1 00:00:03,510 --> 00:00:13,770 The. I just went to the door, but I could tell that he was exhausted. 2 00:00:13,770 --> 00:00:19,500 As usual, he was sitting behind a worn out wooden desk in a small pharmacy in the fringes of old Cairo, 3 00:00:19,500 --> 00:00:25,140 the sprawling lower income neighbourhood that covers large parts of the southern perimeter's. 4 00:00:25,140 --> 00:00:29,730 Dressed in a woollen jumper turtleneck shirt to protect against a winter wind, 5 00:00:29,730 --> 00:00:34,350 it was finalising an order of supplies over the phone while simultaneously 6 00:00:34,350 --> 00:00:38,670 directing his assistant to provide extra pills and syrups on the glass shelves, 7 00:00:38,670 --> 00:00:46,090 covering the walls around the. A steady stream of visitors was calling for his attention by Nafees painkillers, drama, 8 00:00:46,090 --> 00:00:52,060 hair gel, checking their blood pressure and asking to for all sorts of medical advice. 9 00:00:52,060 --> 00:00:59,570 In his early 30s, with two wives and three kids in two separate homes to support, Hamada was familiar with a routine. 10 00:00:59,570 --> 00:01:05,420 For the last five years, I worked five, six, even seven long days per week in the pharmacy, 11 00:01:05,420 --> 00:01:09,830 no holiday throughout this period had amounted to more than four or five days. 12 00:01:09,830 --> 00:01:13,940 After a few minutes, the customer cared for the moment that we got a chance to talk. 13 00:01:13,940 --> 00:01:19,790 Hamouda invited me to sit down on a chair next to him, and he asked his assistant to make us tea. 14 00:01:19,790 --> 00:01:25,260 In the previous month, Hamouda had developed an invaluable interlocutor and a good friend. 15 00:01:25,260 --> 00:01:32,430 An obsessive Zamalek supporter for more than 20 years, he was immensely knowledgeable about the sport's past and present. 16 00:01:32,430 --> 00:01:38,610 Whenever I had come to see him in the pharmacy, as well as when we had attended matches together at Cairo Stadium. 17 00:01:38,610 --> 00:01:45,900 He had taken pains to provide me with all the details and anecdotes I needed to know this afternoon in early February 2012. 18 00:01:45,900 --> 00:01:51,010 However, both of us found it difficult to formulate thoughts and feeling. 19 00:01:51,010 --> 00:01:57,080 Since our last meeting just about a week earlier, the stadium massacre in Port Said had taken place. 20 00:01:57,080 --> 00:02:06,300 The killing of 72 young football fans that unleashed clashes between protesters and security forces that were bringing central Cairo to full. 21 00:02:06,300 --> 00:02:09,300 Being is an account of a different generation than the course, 22 00:02:09,300 --> 00:02:16,560 Hamouda had no personal relation to anyone who had been present in Portsea nonetheless, as a devoted football supporter. 23 00:02:16,560 --> 00:02:22,530 The tragedy affected him profoundly. In face of the unfathomable that had befallen. 24 00:02:22,530 --> 00:02:29,310 We drank our tea in silence. Hamada fiddled with a piece of paper, his gaze remote and tired. 25 00:02:29,310 --> 00:02:31,770 For one, the words I came up with a suggestion, 26 00:02:31,770 --> 00:02:39,360 perhaps he could finish early so we could watch the semi-final in Africa Cup of nations between Ghana and Zambia in a nearby coffee shop. 27 00:02:39,360 --> 00:02:42,300 Tremendous reaction was first one of confusion. 28 00:02:42,300 --> 00:02:48,150 But then he smiled at me, almost embarrassed and said, and this is a quote, I don't know, Carl, but honestly, 29 00:02:48,150 --> 00:02:53,760 until you said it, I didn't know that the semi-final was today and I didn't know who was playing. 30 00:02:53,760 --> 00:02:59,310 It's strange, isn't it? Remember when you asked me about tournament in the 1990s and 2000s? 31 00:02:59,310 --> 00:03:07,440 I knew all the games that all the players, everything didn't. I always watched every game and I remembered so many details about each tournament. 32 00:03:07,440 --> 00:03:12,660 I'm really good at that. And now I don't even know who is playing in the semi-final. 33 00:03:12,660 --> 00:03:16,770 It doesn't matter to me. I kind of think about football any longer. I'm sorry. 34 00:03:16,770 --> 00:03:24,000 It just doesn't feel right. Actually, the only one who discusses football with me these days is youth. 35 00:03:24,000 --> 00:03:30,390 Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk, the action podcast on new books about the Middle East. 36 00:03:30,390 --> 00:03:38,280 These are books that are written sometimes by members of our community or else books that we're talking about in our community at Oxford. 37 00:03:38,280 --> 00:03:45,480 My name is Walter Armours. I teach Strathbogie of the Middle East in the Middle East Studies Programme at the University of Oxford. 38 00:03:45,480 --> 00:03:50,130 Our speaker for this podcast is Khalil Bromell. 39 00:03:50,130 --> 00:03:55,830 Khalil did his Ph.D. in anthropology at the school Oriental and African Studies. 40 00:03:55,830 --> 00:03:58,930 I know him from having been his external examiner. 41 00:03:58,930 --> 00:04:07,320 He finished in twenty fifteen, after which he had a post-doctoral fellowship for a year at present from Modugno Oriente in Berlin, 42 00:04:07,320 --> 00:04:12,240 followed by researcher position in a European Research Council funded project at the University 43 00:04:12,240 --> 00:04:17,940 of Helsinki called Cross Locations Rethinking Relative Locations in the Mediterranean. 44 00:04:17,940 --> 00:04:26,010 And the point of the project, as I understand it, is to understand changes in relations between people and locations in the Mediterranean region. 45 00:04:26,010 --> 00:04:35,430 Karl's dissertation was an ethnography of Egyptian football, a topic that has been crying out for attention for about 50 years. 46 00:04:35,430 --> 00:04:41,130 He happens to have been researching the book during the revolution that began in 2011. 47 00:04:41,130 --> 00:04:46,920 Because of that, a great deal had to be said about the role of the football ultras in the revolution. 48 00:04:46,920 --> 00:04:51,120 But Carl's research goes much further than revolutionary politics. 49 00:04:51,120 --> 00:04:56,910 And a book based on a dissertation is now out, published by the University of Texas Press. 50 00:04:56,910 --> 00:05:05,010 And the title is Egypt's Football Revolution Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics. 51 00:05:05,010 --> 00:05:08,670 Karl, welcome to the Middle East centre community, at least virtually speaking. 52 00:05:08,670 --> 00:05:15,300 One day, we hope to have you actually in our midst talking about your research face to face. 53 00:05:15,300 --> 00:05:23,340 So let me ask you first about writing the book. Tell us something about how the writing of your book proceeded. 54 00:05:23,340 --> 00:05:25,990 What made you want to write about football? 55 00:05:25,990 --> 00:05:31,740 It's almost a cliché to say that everyone in Egypt has to be out there and that failure is not going to follow. 56 00:05:31,740 --> 00:05:41,400 Every one of the two most famous professional football clubs in Egypt was that truism about somehow a starting point for the ethnography, 57 00:05:41,400 --> 00:05:45,330 or did you see it ultimately as an impediment to the hierarchy? 58 00:05:45,330 --> 00:05:51,980 How did you go about formulating your research interests and getting into your field, say? 59 00:05:51,980 --> 00:06:00,200 So thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here. So I think it was a little bit of a starting point as many others. 60 00:06:00,200 --> 00:06:04,400 I came to Egypt first to study Arabic back in 2007 and 2008, 61 00:06:04,400 --> 00:06:09,710 and it's always been a big football fan and always been watching football wherever I've been travelling. 62 00:06:09,710 --> 00:06:15,140 But it was something with football in Egypt that sort of caught my attention even more than in many other places. 63 00:06:15,140 --> 00:06:20,890 And it was the fact that people seem to be absolutely everywhere in the street and always in urban space. 64 00:06:20,890 --> 00:06:25,010 So in all these cafes where people watching the game all over the media, 65 00:06:25,010 --> 00:06:30,350 it was almost difficult to have any type of conversation with people without touching on the topic. 66 00:06:30,350 --> 00:06:33,800 And then obviously, this thing is Amalek thing, these two big clubs. 67 00:06:33,800 --> 00:06:41,230 Right. So when I a couple of years later, wanted to set up a research project for. 68 00:06:41,230 --> 00:06:47,140 This was something I wanted to do something about trying to sort of interrogate how this sort of world of football 69 00:06:47,140 --> 00:06:53,500 that seemed to be everywhere was was creating a baseline for creating some sort of everyday masculinity in Cairo. 70 00:06:53,500 --> 00:07:00,520 Now, what happened was I started my speech in late 2010, and just a few months later, of course, 71 00:07:00,520 --> 00:07:06,790 the revolution happened in January 2011, Panopto that the field sort of transformed beyond recognition. 72 00:07:06,790 --> 00:07:12,130 So instead of studying this when I came to Cairo for my actual fieldwork, is that a main feature of this book? 73 00:07:12,130 --> 00:07:17,270 What's happened between August 2011 and March 2013? 74 00:07:17,270 --> 00:07:24,860 Football was not at all the sort of everyday background noise that I sort of imagine it to be or thought it was when I did my Arabic studies, 75 00:07:24,860 --> 00:07:31,490 but it was rather this extreme politicised thing that was at the same time everywhere it was in the middle of the political transformation, 76 00:07:31,490 --> 00:07:33,640 but also disappearing because people said it all. 77 00:07:33,640 --> 00:07:38,510 We used to like football in the past, but nowadays we don't really care that much about the game anymore. 78 00:07:38,510 --> 00:07:44,090 So instead of starting this thing, that was just an everyday phenomena, sort of just started this thing that was changing all the time. 79 00:07:44,090 --> 00:07:53,570 So the book is basically this story about a hugely important popular culture phenomena, football in Egypt that used to be extremely big, 80 00:07:53,570 --> 00:07:59,870 but then was sort of transforming and disappearing over time in tandem with the revolution and transition. 81 00:07:59,870 --> 00:08:07,220 So in this sense, there's sort of a rise and fall story of football and how it's been taking all these political effects. 82 00:08:07,220 --> 00:08:16,190 And your dissertation, you had quite a bit to say about the decade leading up to the revolution, assuming that probably not the names in the book. 83 00:08:16,190 --> 00:08:21,060 What was important about football decade leading up to the revolution? 84 00:08:21,060 --> 00:08:29,220 So this is this is sort of the starting point for the book, and it's the first two chapters which talk about football in the late Mubarak era. 85 00:08:29,220 --> 00:08:39,310 And I really start my narrative in 1990 when Egypt reached the World Cup in Italy, the first World Cup since 1934, as it was quite a big event. 86 00:08:39,310 --> 00:08:48,400 But the main focus is in the last five years before the revolution, from 2006 until 2011, when Egypt was extremely successful. 87 00:08:48,400 --> 00:08:54,840 And this is the sort of main the most obvious thing that they won three consecutive Africa Cup of nations, 88 00:08:54,840 --> 00:08:59,190 the national team, and actually was also very successful in the African Champions League. 89 00:08:59,190 --> 00:09:03,780 So what I'm trying to argue here is that there was this enormous football high, 90 00:09:03,780 --> 00:09:07,710 unprecedented football hype in Egypt during this period and building up through the 91 00:09:07,710 --> 00:09:13,770 nineties in 2000 and being really sort of climaxing in the last year before 2011. 92 00:09:13,770 --> 00:09:21,090 And I'm trying to delineate why that happened and the different sort of components that came together in this big hype. 93 00:09:21,090 --> 00:09:28,380 And it was, on the one hand, new funding for football teams, semi-public football teams like state institutions owning these teams, 94 00:09:28,380 --> 00:09:34,110 like the military, the police, oil companies, owning football teams and channelling money into the game. 95 00:09:34,110 --> 00:09:43,020 There was a big, big rise of satellite television which picked up Egyptian football and domestic football in particular, very, very strongly. 96 00:09:43,020 --> 00:09:48,870 At one point in time, just before 2011, the there was almost 10 different channels in Egypt, 97 00:09:48,870 --> 00:09:53,790 only showing football so that football only satellite television channels. 98 00:09:53,790 --> 00:10:01,530 Football was also extremely present in popular culture and pop songs and in the movies in this period. 99 00:10:01,530 --> 00:10:06,240 And then, of course, you had all these great results and the Egyptian teams were so successful. 100 00:10:06,240 --> 00:10:09,690 And my argument in this, especially in the first chapter of the book, 101 00:10:09,690 --> 00:10:16,400 is that these things came together in this big what I call a football bubble that sort of encapsulated 102 00:10:16,400 --> 00:10:22,620 the nation and made football a very central feature of the national formation at the time. 103 00:10:22,620 --> 00:10:27,090 And it sort of delineated a way of being a normal Egyptian man, basically. 104 00:10:27,090 --> 00:10:33,900 So if you were a normal Egyptian guy, man at the time, you had to sort of be a football fan and you had to like, 105 00:10:33,900 --> 00:10:40,170 look, we had to be feel strongly for football is what is an emotional high ground the game. 106 00:10:40,170 --> 00:10:43,380 And what was to cut a long story short? 107 00:10:43,380 --> 00:10:52,510 One of the most important things about this, what is about the Mubarak family embodied this normal guy who was not necessarily very intellectual, 108 00:10:52,510 --> 00:10:59,760 looked not particularly Muslim, but not to Muslim in the Muslim Brotherhood sort of sense. 109 00:10:59,760 --> 00:11:07,860 So this normal football person, which was what was embodied by the Mubarak family, by Hosni Mubarak, but also by his two sons, Gamal, 110 00:11:07,860 --> 00:11:14,400 and this became a way for the ruling family to be one with the people in a very positive 111 00:11:14,400 --> 00:11:18,300 and optimistic and upbeat way because the Egyptians team to winning all the time. 112 00:11:18,300 --> 00:11:25,200 So it was a successful version of the Egyptian nation, which was very normalised and which the Mubarak family could tap into, 113 00:11:25,200 --> 00:11:31,300 and hence became a very important part of the sort of soft power of the old regime, I suppose. 114 00:11:31,300 --> 00:11:35,580 OK, so the revolution began in 2011 and goes on through 2012. 115 00:11:35,580 --> 00:11:45,900 And one of the claims that one constantly heard was that football ultras had played a key role in fighting against security forces. 116 00:11:45,900 --> 00:11:51,690 And yet by 2012, the general public was starting to become quite wary of the violence that is going on on the street. 117 00:11:51,690 --> 00:12:01,230 And perhaps was was blaming this on the same young men that were earlier sort of held up as as the kind of the loyal foot soldiers of the revolution, 118 00:12:01,230 --> 00:12:09,600 I guess. What's your take on that dynamic? What was your experience of interacting with ultras and how did they see their role in the revolution? 119 00:12:09,600 --> 00:12:16,060 And was the sort of public discourse about them accurate or revealing about something? 120 00:12:16,060 --> 00:12:21,220 I think it's it's a great question and it's spending like three chapters in the book trying 121 00:12:21,220 --> 00:12:27,040 to talk about the Ultra's role in the revolution in men from many different angles. 122 00:12:27,040 --> 00:12:31,960 But I think this standard narrative about the ultras being very important, 123 00:12:31,960 --> 00:12:37,990 fighting back the police in Tahrir Square and Mohammed Mahmoud Street in this place, it is accurate. 124 00:12:37,990 --> 00:12:45,670 They played an important role and partly because they had an experience of fighting the police before 2011 because they had been the Ultras fans. 125 00:12:45,670 --> 00:12:53,940 Are this new type of football fans that evolved in Egypt from 2007 onwards and much younger type of fans with a different type 126 00:12:53,940 --> 00:13:03,610 of fandom that was very much in opposition to to the way Mubarak and the media was running their type of football at the time. 127 00:13:03,610 --> 00:13:09,400 And because of that to the police, they were ostracised by the media and also very much securitised and persecuted by 128 00:13:09,400 --> 00:13:13,960 the police forces that they had this experience of fighting the police before 2011, 129 00:13:13,960 --> 00:13:21,460 which they then took into the streets and became an important part of the revolutionary transformation in 2011. 130 00:13:21,460 --> 00:13:27,190 Now, what I'm trying to do in this book is also to say that the revolution of the ultras, what was bigger than that? 131 00:13:27,190 --> 00:13:33,250 It was also which I just mentioned as a way of challenging the way the emotional 132 00:13:33,250 --> 00:13:38,440 political babble that that football had constituted during the Mubarak era. 133 00:13:38,440 --> 00:13:48,100 So if if Mubarak had used football in one way to to stake out a version of the nation that was very suitable for him and his and his regime, 134 00:13:48,100 --> 00:13:56,680 the ultras had a very different way of engaging emotionally with the game from 2007 onwards that was more internationally oriented and younger, 135 00:13:56,680 --> 00:14:05,890 more do it yourself, not so dependent on the media, more about like doing your own flags and chants and songs and dance at the stadium, 136 00:14:05,890 --> 00:14:12,460 very much stadium focussed instead of media focussed, very much focussed on social media rather than satellite television. 137 00:14:12,460 --> 00:14:21,220 It was a totally different football universe that was of challenging the way in which football had been media 138 00:14:21,220 --> 00:14:27,910 ties and supported and picked up by the regime and by establishment actors in the run up to the revolution. 139 00:14:27,910 --> 00:14:30,670 So the Egypt football revolution that I'm talking about, 140 00:14:30,670 --> 00:14:38,450 the title of the book is a bigger thing than just the Ultras being fighting the police in the streets, even though that was part of the thing as well. 141 00:14:38,450 --> 00:14:43,610 It was also this emotional challenge, a totally different style of being a football fan, 142 00:14:43,610 --> 00:14:48,760 but also staked out a different way of being an Egyptian national man. 143 00:14:48,760 --> 00:14:56,710 I suppose that then came to overtake Mubarak's football nation during the revolutionary year. 144 00:14:56,710 --> 00:15:05,050 I wanted to ask you about emotion in the book. You know, it's brilliant sort of dissecting the politics of Egyptian football, 145 00:15:05,050 --> 00:15:12,280 but the politics are refracted through masculinity and emotion, which are mentioned in the title of the book. 146 00:15:12,280 --> 00:15:21,850 Why Emotion? I mean, what what caused you to make that kind of the thing that helped to kind of distributed organised politics for several reasons? 147 00:15:21,850 --> 00:15:27,370 First of all, I think it's well, I think, 148 00:15:27,370 --> 00:15:31,090 as I just said about what was happening during the Mubarak era and the way in 149 00:15:31,090 --> 00:15:36,310 which football was why football became so powerful as it is this vehicle to 150 00:15:36,310 --> 00:15:40,660 stake out a version of the nation that was so useful and beneficial for the 151 00:15:40,660 --> 00:15:46,930 Mubarak regime was also because it is such an emotionally attractive thing, 152 00:15:46,930 --> 00:15:48,800 it also draws a lot of people to it. Right. 153 00:15:48,800 --> 00:15:59,670 It is obvious that football becomes this powerful vehicle for mobilisation because it's such an emotional thing that draws people into this world. 154 00:15:59,670 --> 00:16:05,940 But I also think there is something and the way in which it delineates way of being an Egyptian citizen, an Egyptian man, 155 00:16:05,940 --> 00:16:14,820 is through not only making people talk and behave in certain ways, but also feel in certain ways for the nation I'm using. 156 00:16:14,820 --> 00:16:19,290 I'm picking up a lot of Stoller's work affected states affected most. 157 00:16:19,290 --> 00:16:25,530 And I'm delineating a little bit about between the two concepts in the book, but not not so much necessarily. 158 00:16:25,530 --> 00:16:32,250 And I'm saying both that the football is very powerful and in the Egyptian case, especially, 159 00:16:32,250 --> 00:16:38,790 to create this sort of affective state of defining how people should feel for football and also for the nation. 160 00:16:38,790 --> 00:16:45,240 But that is also always a volatile type of politics because you cannot never really control emotions. 161 00:16:45,240 --> 00:16:59,410 They are very powerful, but also always fragile in a way other presumably the normative construct of masculinity demands the suppression of emotion. 162 00:16:59,410 --> 00:17:07,680 Drew, Drew, that's that's maybe the stereotype about that, but I for me, this is in the case of football, it's definitely not the case. 163 00:17:07,680 --> 00:17:10,480 You are supposed to feel very strongly for the football team. 164 00:17:10,480 --> 00:17:16,780 And the ultras are all about creating a strong emotional performance and strong emotional communities at the stadium. 165 00:17:16,780 --> 00:17:18,040 That's that's what it's all about. 166 00:17:18,040 --> 00:17:24,490 Otherwise, it would never have drawn in hundreds of thousands of young kids in Egypt to do this thing if if it wasn't fun. 167 00:17:24,490 --> 00:17:29,440 You know, this is the main thing. All the people that interlocutor's, the ultras, friends, 168 00:17:29,440 --> 00:17:36,280 they always talk about how that this is the best thing that they can do, the thing that, like, they love themselves to do. 169 00:17:36,280 --> 00:17:42,880 Just understand that. That actually leads to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is, I mean, you know, in a way to, you know, 170 00:17:42,880 --> 00:17:51,670 to force football into the more of politics, kind of kills it in a way mean, you know, it's a game that people love is a game that people enjoy. 171 00:17:51,670 --> 00:17:57,160 And this perhaps is a way to kind of gesture towards where it leads in the end, 172 00:17:57,160 --> 00:18:01,120 because I know that you aware of this from from having read your dissertation. 173 00:18:01,120 --> 00:18:07,570 And so, you know, the joy of the game, did that eventually transcend the politics? 174 00:18:07,570 --> 00:18:13,150 Did it sort of merge with the politics? You know, do people still love playing football? 175 00:18:13,150 --> 00:18:17,530 And and where did the politics of the revolutionary period? 176 00:18:17,530 --> 00:18:25,360 Yeah, probably the final part of the title, right, so Egypt's revolution in motion, masculinity and uneasy politics. 177 00:18:25,360 --> 00:18:32,740 Right. So that's one thing that is popping up in several chapters in the book in which wasn't really that highlighted in this dissertation. 178 00:18:32,740 --> 00:18:38,460 But the much more emphasis now in the book is this way in which. 179 00:18:38,460 --> 00:18:42,660 Well, as far as this passage I read initially himself, 180 00:18:42,660 --> 00:18:49,530 and this is part of a chapter when I talk a lot about how fans who used to be extremely invested in football, extremely passionate about the game, 181 00:18:49,530 --> 00:18:53,610 lost their interest and their passions and their feelings for football, 182 00:18:53,610 --> 00:19:02,300 especially after this very tragic stadium massacre of 72 hour response in Portsea on the 1st of February 2012. 183 00:19:02,300 --> 00:19:07,640 This is a process that had been going on for a while already before that, but after that it was became widespread. 184 00:19:07,640 --> 00:19:12,460 A lot of people tell that we cannot really care about the sport anymore. 185 00:19:12,460 --> 00:19:19,300 Partly because so many people have died, but the way it formulated it and this is the important thing, is the cost of the game has been politicised. 186 00:19:19,300 --> 00:19:30,900 It's been entangled with politics, CSA. So here you have the problem that when it became articulated that football had been politicised. 187 00:19:30,900 --> 00:19:40,470 And this started to happen slightly before 2011, but then became accentuated a much more widespread in 2011 and 2012, 188 00:19:40,470 --> 00:19:48,630 it became more and more difficult for people to feel and care about the game because there was some sort of tension between, 189 00:19:48,630 --> 00:19:58,890 on the one hand, football being this, the space of joy and freedom and pleasure and politics with all these uneasy connotations of uncertainty, 190 00:19:58,890 --> 00:20:06,000 of violence, of seriousness, I suppose, which made it difficult for a lot of people to feel for the game. 191 00:20:06,000 --> 00:20:10,500 And I'm trying to delineate that through the graphic study of discussions, debate, 192 00:20:10,500 --> 00:20:16,680 but also experiences of CSR politics in Egypt and how people talk about it and also feel 193 00:20:16,680 --> 00:20:20,850 politics in different ways and how that it's always sort of connoting these feelings of 194 00:20:20,850 --> 00:20:27,780 unease and anxieties in many different ways and how that has led over time to football 195 00:20:27,780 --> 00:20:34,170 becoming more and more difficult to feel for and care for in the way people did before 2011. 196 00:20:34,170 --> 00:20:39,750 And as I say in the postscript, which deals with the last two years, twenty, eighteen and twenty or twenty, 197 00:20:39,750 --> 00:20:47,640 eighteen and twenty nineteen, when Egypt reached the World Cup in 2018 and hosted African Cup of Nations 2019, this thing started. 198 00:20:47,640 --> 00:20:54,660 This ambivalence is still there, even though Mohammed Salaf, the new big football superstar, is the big, best player ever. 199 00:20:54,660 --> 00:21:01,620 Egypt has reached a World Cup, which it didn't do during the Mubarak era, except for 1990. 200 00:21:01,620 --> 00:21:05,430 There was still not at all the same type of hype around the game. 201 00:21:05,430 --> 00:21:12,180 And part of that was because a lot of fans felt that they had realised after revolution they 202 00:21:12,180 --> 00:21:17,110 had been sort of fooled by this big football hype and it didn't want that to be recreated. 203 00:21:17,110 --> 00:21:24,150 There was always an inside is like, do we really want to wholeheartedly support this football team again? 204 00:21:24,150 --> 00:21:34,710 There's a risk of getting back to the same politicisation that they had sort of managed to get away from doing the during the Revolutionary War. 205 00:21:34,710 --> 00:21:42,270 So there is this anxiety that I'm trying to to delineate in the book in several chapters to more linked questions. 206 00:21:42,270 --> 00:21:48,370 First of all, are you continuing to do research on football specifically? 207 00:21:48,370 --> 00:21:55,740 We're moving into new directions. And secondly, if one were I mean, your book is brilliant. 208 00:21:55,740 --> 00:22:00,030 I mean, it's a brilliant book based on a brilliant dissertation, which I loved reading. 209 00:22:00,030 --> 00:22:07,110 But is it the last word of football, if one were to continue doing if somebody else were to do research on football? 210 00:22:07,110 --> 00:22:13,100 What would you want them to tell them to look at? This is this is a good question. 211 00:22:13,100 --> 00:22:16,510 I'm sort of still doing it, but in a slightly different way. 212 00:22:16,510 --> 00:22:22,120 I'm looking more at youth football and the way in which sort of everyday football I'm sort of 213 00:22:22,120 --> 00:22:25,690 back to this everyday football thing that I was sort of starting out with before the revolution 214 00:22:25,690 --> 00:22:30,940 struck and looking at the emergence of these small new football pitches all over Cairo and sort 215 00:22:30,940 --> 00:22:38,330 of but morphed from a sort of investor perspective rather than actually with the game itself. 216 00:22:38,330 --> 00:22:43,220 I think. And it's a good question and. 217 00:22:43,220 --> 00:22:44,930 There are several obvious options, 218 00:22:44,930 --> 00:22:52,670 there's this and I'm also looking at it in the paper I'm writing at the moment about the sort of religious connotations around the game, 219 00:22:52,670 --> 00:22:56,300 the sort of this blatant fact that a lot of people have been mentioning, 220 00:22:56,300 --> 00:23:04,370 but never really understood that there are absolutely very few Christian Egyptians who who have been representing, 221 00:23:04,370 --> 00:23:11,930 like there's been one Egyptian player ever in the national team and over hundreds more than one hundred years. 222 00:23:11,930 --> 00:23:16,910 There is something there with with the way in which football is coded us as Muslim, 223 00:23:16,910 --> 00:23:23,030 but also about obviously some sort of discrimination at many multiple levels. 224 00:23:23,030 --> 00:23:28,970 That makes no, I'm assuming in real life Christians, Christian kids play football as much as Muslim. 225 00:23:28,970 --> 00:23:32,000 Absolutely to do, but for some reason to never really reach the top. 226 00:23:32,000 --> 00:23:36,400 And that's that's something that could be, I don't know, looked at somehow if it's possible. 227 00:23:36,400 --> 00:23:46,610 I'm not really sure. I'm not exactly sure what like and in terms of fan culture, the Ultras are not really there anymore. 228 00:23:46,610 --> 00:23:51,500 I was just allowing the biggest oppressed group was dissolved in twenty eighteen. 229 00:23:51,500 --> 00:23:56,560 So they they just don't exist, all dressed as white knights. 230 00:23:56,560 --> 00:24:03,030 But just the ultra supporting ZMOLEK, the second biggest club in Cairo, just still around, but they're quite inactive. 231 00:24:03,030 --> 00:24:07,040 So that's sort of the thing that I've been writing about, about the politicisation of the game. 232 00:24:07,040 --> 00:24:14,870 And that seems to be sort of disappearing a lot of that, although, of course, 233 00:24:14,870 --> 00:24:20,090 at the same time, this hesitancy for football to come back is it will waned with time. 234 00:24:20,090 --> 00:24:23,540 It will disappear. I'm sure football will come back and be enormously popular. 235 00:24:23,540 --> 00:24:29,970 It is enormously popular in Egypt today as it is everywhere. 236 00:24:29,970 --> 00:24:33,360 Anything else you want to say? 237 00:24:33,360 --> 00:24:42,930 I may be able to also mention of this unease, this anxiety is about politics is something that pops up also into Ultra's chapters all the time. 238 00:24:42,930 --> 00:24:55,980 Where I'm running an argument about or I'm showing through my material about the Ultra's, we're constantly accused by the media for being political. 239 00:24:55,980 --> 00:25:03,000 So that was one of the main ways in which they were demonised by by the media and by the establishment 240 00:25:03,000 --> 00:25:08,650 actors that they were trying to when they were trying to revolutionise Egyptian political data, 241 00:25:08,650 --> 00:25:17,880 always because they have political meaning, that they were fighting for their own specific demands, their own specific, not for the nation as a whole, 242 00:25:17,880 --> 00:25:27,000 right at the same time to constantly try to say we are not political either by saying, OK, we are only football fans, we're not into politics, 243 00:25:27,000 --> 00:25:32,220 or by saying that we are pure nationalist and everyone else, we are fighting for the good of the whole people, 244 00:25:32,220 --> 00:25:40,360 but the entire Egyptian people for a moment, when Donald Trump managed to stay very strong and have a very strong say in Egyptian politics, 245 00:25:40,360 --> 00:25:48,330 in the revolutionary transition, they managed to pull off this sort of balancing act between being a very forceful force and doing a 246 00:25:48,330 --> 00:25:53,760 lot of things and running campaigns for change and justice and everything without looking political. 247 00:25:53,760 --> 00:26:02,610 But in the end, they lost the ability for a number of reasons that I outlined prior prior to the revolution. 248 00:26:02,610 --> 00:26:06,750 I mean, ultras would be the sort of people that many middle class people would fear. 249 00:26:06,750 --> 00:26:10,980 And, you know, there was a movie there was in the theatre just before the revolution came out called Six, 250 00:26:10,980 --> 00:26:16,020 seven, eight, which is about sexual harassment, in which one of the characters, one of the female characters, 251 00:26:16,020 --> 00:26:22,590 is raped in the aftermath of a football match by I mention that I mentioned that in one chapter after ultras, 252 00:26:22,590 --> 00:26:27,280 like people who kind of look a little bit like kind of like the serious fans like office perhaps. 253 00:26:27,280 --> 00:26:27,780 So. 254 00:26:27,780 --> 00:26:35,940 So it wasn't either, you know, a very interesting balancing act that they were able to achieve during the revolution that there was for a year there. 255 00:26:35,940 --> 00:26:41,460 There was this exceptional moment when they somehow tried to be both very active and very forward 256 00:26:41,460 --> 00:26:47,040 looking and like doing all these things and effecting all this change without looking political. 257 00:26:47,040 --> 00:26:53,460 But then they somehow lost that ability and then they sort of also became very marginalised from the revolutionary struggle. 258 00:26:53,460 --> 00:26:57,060 And I'm sort of make an argument and a conclusion that this might be something that we 259 00:26:57,060 --> 00:27:00,390 might want to considering for the for the revolutionary movement as a whole in Egypt, 260 00:27:00,390 --> 00:27:05,400 that there was always this this assumption that the revolution should be nationalist for the whole 261 00:27:05,400 --> 00:27:12,300 people and not really political in that sense of being for a faction of a certain class or something, 262 00:27:12,300 --> 00:27:20,040 and that it might not be very easy to to to carry out a revolutionary change if you want to stay non-political at the same time. 263 00:27:20,040 --> 00:27:25,320 And I know that you and other researchers are doing work on the end of the post 264 00:27:25,320 --> 00:27:33,240 revolution and sort of how people deal with the let down revolution that was defeated. 265 00:27:33,240 --> 00:27:36,840 And, you know, for the elections, I guess nothing of a revolution was their shining moment. 266 00:27:36,840 --> 00:27:45,550 And, you know, that that must have been particularly hard. Very much so, and a lot of the leaders are either in prison or abroad, 267 00:27:45,550 --> 00:27:49,900 a lot of people are not living in Egypt anymore or moving on to some other type of career. 268 00:27:49,900 --> 00:27:57,040 People are getting growing older. So, you know, most of these people were in their early 20s at the time and older in their early 30s. 269 00:27:57,040 --> 00:28:03,820 And, you know. Well, I think on that rather sad note, we're going to have to end. 270 00:28:03,820 --> 00:28:06,970 Yeah, it's been wonderful talking to you. I love reading the station. 271 00:28:06,970 --> 00:28:15,940 I enjoyed reading the book, which I suspect is quite similar to the dissertation, which was one of the actually one of the best ones I've read. 272 00:28:15,940 --> 00:28:25,180 I've been speaking with author Carl Raml about his book, Egypt's Football Revolution Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics. 273 00:28:25,180 --> 00:28:32,795 And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.