1/4/2006
Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Hindustan Time

Iran’s loudmouth President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, skirted the ultimate global sanction when he declared Auschwitz and all that a ‘fairy tale’ in December. The German Green Party called for Iran to be tossed out of this year’s World Cup. Sixties euro-icon Daniel Cohn-Bendit argued Teheran’s participation should at least be reviewed to get “a serious-minded debate going in Iran”. FIFA signalled play on. “We strictly separate politics from sports,” said its spokesperson.

In any case, no one seconded the motion. Not the Iranian opposition in exile. Not even Israel. It may have helped that most US politicians believe the World Cup is about badminton or something.

More important: penalising Iranian football for the views of a man who once lectured the United Nations on the Second Coming is a case of right idea, wrong target.

In Iran, fundamentalism has no greater foe than football.

Get this straight: the present regime in Iran greeted the country’s qualification to the World Cup with gritted teeth. Ahmadinejad will muster a grimace if his national team has a ‘fairy tale’ run in Germany this summer.

He’s already done his spiritual best to impair what is rated the best Iranian football team in history. Ponytails, hair bands and designer facial hair have been banned, thanks to the head of the country’s sports council, a fundamentalist crony. Ahmadinejad’s rant against Israel had an immediate fallout: Iran’s coach Branko Markovic suddenly found a scheduled World Cup warm-up match with Romania cancelled and no takers for future friendlies.

Iran’s conservative clergy have been seeing red cards ever since football was introduced by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company and missionaries in the Twenties and then bolstered by football fanatic Shah Reza Pahlavi. The Pahlavis delighted in converting confiscated mosque land into football fields. The faithful pelted football players with stones. But for a rapidly urbanising Iran, there was no sport but soccer, and television its medium.

When the ayatollahs came to power, they easily suppressed pop music and dancing. But football’s mass base proved, well, a different ball game. They had to settle for co-option, festooning stadiums with ‘Death to the US’ signs and, laughingly, trying to get crowds to chant paeans to Allah. But a 1987 fatwa banished women from the stands.

The national team foundered thanks to an insistence that players be pious rather than professional. However, the outcry that followed a string of humiliating defeats in the Eighties was so loud that the clerics beat a retreat.

But football was firmly etched as the bane of Khomeiniism. It represented everything clerics and their bullyboys, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, couldn’t stand. Every time Iran has scored a historical football victory — most famously when it defeated the US in the 1998 World Cup — the public reaction has been the stuff of fundamentalist nightmare: female fans forcing their way into the stadiums, men and women dancing on the streets, veils being tossed aside and policemen joining the crowds they were sent to control.

Most Iranians believe the 1998 experience was so traumatic for the regime that it deliberately threw a 2002 World Cup qualifying match. Iran lost to lowly Bahrain 3-1 in that match. The Iranian strikers were so shy of firing at the goal that a TV commentator exclaimed, “Why doesn’t someone shoot that ball?”

The dilemma for the conservative clergy was that this didn’t really help. Now, any Iranian football defeat is laid at their feet. When, after the Bahrain debacle, Iran fell out of the World Cup by losing to Ireland, Irish witnesses said, “Iranians ripped out and set fire to seats, tore down banners depicting images of the country’s senior mullahs.” Whether it’s defeat or victory, Iranian football frenzy often ends with the same chant: “Death to the mullahs.”

In a recent book on football and globalisation, journalist Franklin Foer argued that “Iranians crave international soccer because the game links them to the advanced, capitalist, un-Islamic West”. There’s something in that, especially among urban middle-class youth. Another football philosopher, Simon Kuper, claims that in Iran and other places, “soccer fandom is replacing cigarette smoking as the iconic image of Western youth culture”.

However, football in Iran is more than just Man U and Becks, chav and Adidas. It’s about unadulterated 19th century nationalism. More importantly, it’s a version that is quite distinct from the Islamicist definition of nation propagated by Khomeini and being rehashed by his disciple, Ahmadinejad. Iran’s reformist President Mohammed Khatami declared his sympathy for the more secular version by seeking endorsements by football stars on the 1997 campaign trail.

In other words, an Iranian football fan’s dislike of ayatollahs is not about being pro-West but about favouring a modern Iran. Thus the ecstatic response to the victory over the US. This football nationalism is not new. It is often forgotten that the first case of ‘football revolution’ sentiment in Iran occurred when Iran defeated Israel in the late Sixties. This was during the Shah’s Israel-friendly years, but the Iranian public had their own ideas.

Kuper has an account of a British visitor accosted by an Iranian student in Isfahan.

“You are from England? After Israel and America, you are our biggest enemy. Don’t you think George Bush is the biggest terrorist of all for supporting Israel? Do you think Beckham should play on the right for Manchester United, or in the centre?”

The Briton honed in on the question that mattered. “Sure. On the right.”

“What? And Paul Scholes in the centre?”

Iranian bloggers who discussed Ahmadinejad’s Israeli-bashing were also Iran First, Islam second. One of them, fretting about the damage the president was doing to Iran’s World Cup prospects, wrote, “Once again we are sacrificing the national interest for Arabs.”

This is the ultimate reason why the mullahs so fear the referee’s whistle. Iran’s eleven, Team Melli, are far more representative of 21st century Iranian identity then the men in black robes ever will be. The Iranian team’s assistant coach, Human Afazeli, declared, “In Iran, football is now part of everyday life. Iranian media and fans have big dreams, and our mission is not to let them down.” And whether the dreams succeed or fail, the mullahs lose out.

Ahmadinejad said in December, “Today the only messenger of true Islam and complete Islam is the Iranian nation.” Let’s modify that. Today the only messenger of true and complete Iranian nationalism is Team Melli.