I don't mind when they to the door, but I could tell that he was exhausted.
As usual, he was sitting behind a worn out would invest in a small pharmacy in the fringes of old Cairo,
the sprawling lower income neighbourhood that covers large parts of the southern perimeters.
Dressed in a woollen jumper turtleneck shirt to protect against a winter wind,
it was finalising an order of supplies over the phone while simultaneously directing his assistant
to provide packs of pills and syrups on the glass shelves covering the walls around them.
The steady stream of visitors was calling for his attention by not these painkillers Tramadol with hair gel,
making their blood pressure and asking to withdraw all sorts of medical advice.
In his early 30s, with two wives and three kids in two separate homes to support, Hamada was familiar with a routine for the last five years.
Get worked five, six, seven long days per week in the pharmacy.
No holiday throughout this period had amounted to more than four or five days.
After a few minutes, the customer cared for the moment that we got a chance to talk.
Hamada invited me to sit down on a chair next to him, and he asked his assistant to make us tea.
In the previous month, Hamouda had developed an invaluable interlocutor and a good friend, an obsessive Zmolek supporter for more than twenty years.
It was immensely knowledgeable about the sport's past and present.
Whenever I had come to see him in the pharmacy, as well as when we had attended matches together at Cairo Stadium,
he had taken pains to provide me with all the details and anecdotes I needed to know this afternoon in early February 2012.
However, both of us found it difficult to formulate thoughts and feeling.
Since our last meeting about a week earlier, the stadium massacre in Port Said had taken place.
The killing of 72 young football fans that unleashed clashes between protesters and security forces that were bringing central Cairo to full.
Being is an account of a different generation and of Hamouda had no personal relation to anyone who had been President Ford.
Nonetheless, as a devoted football supporter,
the tragedy affected him profoundly in face of the unfathomable that had befallen with rancour and silence,
Hamouda fiddle with a piece of paper, his gaze removed and tired.
Well, one, two words, I came up with a suggestion perhaps we could he could finish early so we could watch the
semi-final in Africa Cup of Nations between Ghana and Zambia and a nearby coffee shop.
Hamada's Raksha was the first one of confusion. But then he smiled at me, almost embarrassed and said, this is a quote.
I don't know, Carl, but honestly, until you said it, I didn't know that the semi-final was today and I didn't know who was playing.
It's strange, isn't it? Remember when you asked me about tournaments in the 1990s and 2000s?
I knew all the games that all the players, everything did. And I always watched every game and I remembered so many details about each tournament.
I'm really good at that. And now I don't even know who is playing in the semi-final.
It doesn't matter to me. I kind of think about football any longer. I'm sorry.
It just doesn't feel right. Actually, the only one who discusses football with me these days is you.
Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk, the Oxford podcast on new books about Middle East.
These are books that are written sometimes by members of our community or else by books that we're talking about in our community at Oxford.
My name is Walter Armbrust. I teach part of the Middle East in the Middle East Studies Programme at the University of Oxford, Pakistan.
I was speaker for this podcast is Karl Bromell.
Karl did his PhD in anthropology at the school, Oriental and African Studies.
I know him from having been his external examiner. He finished in twenty fifteen years our 2015.
Fifteen, you know, afterwards, she had a post-doctoral fellowship for a year at the from modern Orient and Berlin, followed by research,
a position in a European Research Council funded project at the University of
Helsinki called Cross Locations Rethinking Relative Locations in the Mediterranean.
And the point of project, as I understand it, is to understand changes in relations between people and locations in the Mediterranean region.
Khalil's dissertation was an ethnography of Egyptian football, a topic that has been crying out for attention for about 50 years.
He happens to have been researching the book during the revolution that began in 2011, but through.
Through, through because of that, a great deal.
Had to be said about the role of the football ultras in the revolution, but Carl's research goes much further than revolutionary politics.
And a book based on the station is now out, published by the University of Texas Press.
And the title is Egypt's Football Revolution Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics.
Karl, welcome to the Middle East centre community, at least virtually speaking.
One day, we hope to have you actually in our midst talking about your research face to face.
So let me ask you first about writing the book. Tell us something about how the writing of your book proceeded.
What made you want to write about football? It's almost a cliché to say that everyone in Egypt has to be either in Fallujah as an
going a follower of one of the two most famous professional football clubs in Egypt.
Was that truism about somehow a starting point for the ethnography, or did you see it ultimately as an impediment to the hierarchy?
How did you go about formulating your research interests and getting into your field?
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.
I came to Egypt first to to study Arabic back in 2007 and 2008 and always been a
big football fan and always been watching football wherever I've been travelling.
But it was something with football in Egypt that sort of caught my attention even more than in many other places.
And it was the fact that football seemed to be absolutely everywhere in the street and always in urban space.
So in all these cafes where people watching the game all over the media,
it was almost difficult to have any type of conversation with people without without touching on the topic.
And then they'll obviously this thing is a marketing thing, these two big clubs.
Right. So when I a couple of years later wanted to set up a research project for pièce.
This was something I wanted to do something about trying to sort of interrogate how how this sort of world of football
that seemed to be everywhere was was creating a baseline for creating some sort of everyday masculinity in Cairo.
Now, what happened was I started my PhD in late 2010, and just a few months later, of course, the revolution happened in January 2011.
So and after that, the field sort of transformed beyond recognition.
So instead of studying this when I came to Cairo for my actual fieldwork,
is the main fieldwork for this book was happened between August 2011 and March 2013.
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,
but it was rather this extremely politicised thing that was at the same time everywhere it was in the middle of the political transformation,
but also disappearing because people said it, oh, we used to like football in the past,
but nowadays we don't really care that much about the game anymore.
So instead of studying this thing, that was just an everyday phenomena, sort of just started this thing that was changing all the time.
So the book is basically this story about a hugely important popular culture phenomena, football in Egypt that used to be extremely big,
but then was sort of transforming and disappearing over time in tandem with the revolution transition.
So it's in the sense that it's sort of a rise and fall story of football and how it's been taking all these political effects.
Your dissertation, you had quite a bit to say about the decade leading up to the revolution, and I'm assuming that probably not the names in the book.
What was important about football in the decade leading up to the revolution?
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.
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.
But the main focus is on the last five years before the revolution from 2006 until 2012 11, when Egypt was extremely successful.
And this is the sort of main the most obvious thing that they won three consecutive Africa Cup of nations,
the national team, and actually was also very successful in Africa. So what I'm trying to argue here is that there was this enormous football high,
unprecedented football hype in Egypt during this period and building up through the
nineties in 2000 and being really sort of climaxing in the last year before 2011.
And I'm trying to to to delineate why that happened and the different sort of components that came together in this big hype.
And it was, on the one hand, new funding for football teams, semi-public football teams like state institutions owning these teams,
like the military, the police, oil companies, owning football teams and channelling money into the game.
There was a big, big rise of satellite television which picked up Egyptian football and domestic football in particular, very, very strongly.
At one point in time, just before 2011, the there was almost 10 different channels in Egypt, only showing football.
So football only satellite television channels and football was also extremely present in popular culture,
in pop songs and in the movies in this period.
And then, of course, you had all these great results with the Gyptian teams were so successful.
And my argument in this, especially in the first chapter of the book,
is that these things came together in this this big what I call a football bubble that sort of
encapsulated a nation and made football a very central feature of of the national formation at the time.
And it sort of delineated a way of being a normal Egyptian man, basically.
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 football,
you had to be feel strongly for football is what is an emotional high ground the game and.
And what was to cut a long story short?
One of the most important things about this was also that the Mubarak family embodied this normal guy who was not necessarily very intellectual,
not not particularly Muslim, but not to Muslim in the Muslim Brotherhood sort of sense.
So this normal football person, which was what was embodied by the Mubarak family, by Hosni Mubarak, but also by his two sons, Gamal,
and this became a way for the ruling family to be one with the people in a very positive and optimistic and upbeat way,
because the Egyptians seem to winning all the time. So it was a successful version of the Egyptian nation, which was very normalised,
in which the Mubarak family could tap into and hence became a very important part of the sort of soft power of the of the regime, I suppose.
OK, so so the revolution began in 2011 and goes on through 2012.
And one of the claims that one constantly heard was that football ultras had played a key role in fighting against security forces.
And yet by 2012, the general public was starting to become quite wary of the violence that is going on on the street.
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,
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?
And was the sort of public discourse about them accurate or or revealing about something?
I think it's it's a great question.
I was spending like three chapters in the book trying to talk about the Ultras role in the revolution from many different angles.
But I think this standard narrative about the ultras being very important,
fighting back the police in Tahrir Square and Mohammed Mahmoud Street and this place, it is accurate.
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.
Are this new type of football fans that evolved in Egypt from 2007 onwards and much younger type of fans with a different type
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.
And because of that to the police, they were ostracised by the media and also very much securitise and persecuted by the police forces.
So they had this experience of fighting the police before 2011,
which they then took into the streets and became an important part of the revolutionary transformation in 2011.
Now, what I'm trying to do in this book is also to say that the sort of the revolution of the ultras, what was was bigger than that.
It was also which I just mentioned as a way of challenging the way the emotional
political bubble that that football had had constituted during the Mubarak era.
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,
the ultras had a very different way of engaging emotionally with the game from 2007 onwards that was more internationally oriented and younger,
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,
very much stadium focussed instead of media focussed, very much focussed on social media rather than satellite television.
It was a totally different football universe that was challenging the way in which football had been media ties
and supported and picked up by the regime and by establishment actors up in the run up to the revolution.
So the Egypt football revolution that I'm talking about,
the title of the book is it's a bigger thing than just the Ultras being fighting the police in the streets,
even though that was part of the thing as well. It was also this emotional channel challenge, a totally different style of being a football fan,
but also staked out a different way of being an Egyptian national man.
I suppose that then came to overtake Mubarak's football nation during the revolutionary year.
I wanted to ask you about emotion. You know, the book.
You know, it's brilliant at dissecting the politics of Egyptian football,
but but the politics are refracted through masculinity and emotion, which are mentioned of the title of the book.
Why emotion? I mean, what what what caused you to make that kind of conflict?
Thing that helped to kind of distributed organised politics for several reasons.
First of all, I think it's well, I think,
as I just said about what was happening during the Mubarak era and the way in
which football was why football became so powerful as it is this vehicle to
stake out a version of the nation that was so useful and beneficial for the
Mubarak regime was also because it is such an emotionally attractive thing.
It also draws a lot of people to it. Right. So it is obvious that football becomes this powerful vehicle for mobilisation
because it's such an emotional thing that that that draws people into this world.
But I also think there is something and then the way in which and the way in which it delineates way of being an Egyptian citizen,
an Egyptian man is through not only making people talk and behave in a certain way, but also feel in certain ways for the nation.
I'm using I'm picking up a lot of stories where it affected states, you know, affect emotion.
I'm belittling it, delineating a little bit about between the two concepts in the book, but not not so much necessarily.
And I'm saying both that the football is very powerful and in the Egyptian case, especially,
to create this sort of affective state of defining how people should feel for feel for football and also for the nation.
But that is also always a volatile type of politics, because you cannot never really control emotions.
You cannot really. And they are very powerful, but also always fragile in a way.
Other presumably the normative construct of masculinity demands the suppression of emotion.
Drew, Drew, that's that's maybe the stereotype about that, but I mean, this is in case of people is definitely not the case.
You are supposed to feel very strongly for the team.
And the ultras are all about creating a strong emotional performances, strong emotional communities at the stadium.
That's that's what it's all about.
That's why it's so 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. You know, this is this is this is the main thing.
All the people that interlocutor's, my ultras friends, they always talk about how that this is the best thing that they do,
the thing that, like, they love themselves to do just down the street.
That actually leads to the next question I wanted to ask you, which is, I mean, you know, in a way to, you know,
to force football into the more the politics kind of kind of kills it in a way when,
you know, it's a game that people love is a game that people enjoy.
And this perhaps kind of is a way to kind of gesture towards where it book leads in the end,
because I know that you're aware of this from from having read your dissertation.
And so, you know, the joy of the game. Did that eventually transcend the politics?
Did it did it sort of merge with the politics? You know, do not go to people.
Do people still love playing football? And and where did the politics of the revolutionary period?
Yeah, probably the final part of the title, right, so Egypt's football revolution in motion, masculinity and uneasy politics.
Right. So one thing that is popping up in several chapters in the book in which wasn't really that highlighted in this dissertation,
but the much more emphasis now in the book verse in the book is this way in which.
Well, as far as this this passage I read initially himself,
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,
lost their interest and their passions and their feelings for football,
especially after this very tragic stadium massacre, a 72 hour response in Quartzite on the 1st of February 2012.
And this is a process that had been going on for a while already before that, but after that it was became widespread.
A lot of people felt that we cannot really care about the sport anymore.
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.
It's been entangled with politics, CSA.
So here you have the problem that when it became part, when it became articulated that football had been politicised.
And this started to happen slightly before 2011, but then became accentuated a much more widespread in 2011 and 2012,
it became more and more difficult for people to feel and care about the game because there was some sort of tension between,
on the one hand, football being this this space of joy and freedom and pleasure and politics with all these uneasy connotations of uncertainty,
of violence, of all seriousness, I suppose, which made it difficult for a lot of people to feel for the game.
And I'm trying to delineate that through the graphic study of of of discussions, debate,
but also experiences of CSR politics in Egypt and how people talk about it and also feel
politics in different ways and how that it's always sort of connoting these feelings of unease
and anxieties and in many different ways and how that has led over time to football becoming
more and more difficult to feel for and cared for in the way people did before 2011.
And as I say in the postscript, which deals with the last two years, 21, 18 and 24,
2018 and 2019, when Egypt reached the World Cup in 2018 and posted African Cup of Nations 2019,
this side, this ambivalence is still there, even though Mohammed Soloff, the new big football superstar, is the big, best player ever.
Egypt has reached a World Cup, which it didn't do during the Mubarak era, and especially except for 1990.
There was still not at all the same type of hype around the game.
And part of that was because a lot of fans felt that they had realised after revolution they
had been sort of fooled by this big football hype and it didn't want that to be recreated.
There was always an inside is like, do we really want to wholeheartedly support this football team again?
There's a risk of getting back to the same politicisation that they had sort of managed to get away from doing during the Revolutionary War.
And so there is this anxiety that I'm trying to to delineate in the book and in several chapters to more linked questions.
First of all, are you continuing to do research on football specifically or moving into new directions?
And secondly, if one were I mean, your book was brilliant.
I mean, it's a brilliant book based on a brilliant dissertation, which I loved reading.
But is it the last word in football if one were to continue doing well, if somebody else were to do research on football?
What would you want them to tell them to look at? This is this is a good question.
I'm sort of still doing it, but in a slightly different way.
I'm looking more at youth football and the way in which sort of everyday football sort of back
to this everyday football thing that I was sort of starting out with before the revolution
struck and looking at the emergence of this small new football pitches all over Cairo and sort
of but morphed from a sort of investor perspective rather than actually with the game itself.
And I think. And, you know, it's a good question and.
There are several obvious options,
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,
the sort of this blatant fact that a lot of people have been mentioning,
but never really understood that there are absolutely very few Christian Egyptians who who have been representing,
like there's been one Egyptian player ever in the national team over hundreds more than one hundred years.
So this is something there is something there with with them and the way in which football is quoted us as Muslim,
but also about obviously some sort of discrimination at many multiple levels that I'm assuming in real life.
Christians, Christian kids play football as much as Muslim. Absolutely to do, but for some reason to never really reach the top.
And that's that's something that could be, I don't know, looked at somehow if it's possible.
I'm not really sure. Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what like in terms of fan culture, the Ultras are not really there anymore.
Ultras Alawi, the biggest focus group, was dissolved in twenty eighteen.
So they they just don't exist.
Ultras white knights were just ultra supporting ZMOLEK, the second biggest club in Cairo, just still around, but they're quite inactive.
So that's sort of the thing that I've been writing about, about the politicisation of the game.
And that seems to be sort of disappearing and a lot of that.
Although, of course, you know, at the same time, this hesitancy for football to come back, it's likely it will waned with time, it will disappear.
I'm sure football will come back and be enormously popular. It is enormously popular in Egypt today as it is everywhere.
You know, anything else you want to say? Um.
Not maybe also some mention of this unease, this inside is about politics is something that pops up also into Ultra's chapters all the time,
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.
So that was one of the main ways in which they were demonised by and by the media and by establishment
actors that they were trying to when they were trying to revolutionary revolutionaries,
Egyptian political data, always positive political meaning that they were fighting for their own specific demands, their own specific,
not for the nation as a whole, right at the same time to just constantly try to say we are not political either by saying,
OK, we are only football fans, we're not into politics, or by saying that we are pure nationalist and everyone else we are fighting for,
for the cause, for the good of the whole people.
But the entire Egyptian people for a moment, when Donald Trump managed to to just stay very strong and have a very strong say in Egyptian politics,
in the revolutionary transition,
they managed to pull off this sort of balancing act between being being a very forceful force and doing a lot of things.
They're running campaigns for change and justice and everything without looking political.
But in the end, they lost the ability for a number of reasons that I outlined some of them.
It was remarkable because prior prior to the revolution, I mean, ultras would be the sort of people that many middle class people would fear.
And, you know, there was a movie there was in the theatre just before the revolution came out called Six, seven, eight,
which is about sexual harassment, in which one of the characters, one of the female characters, is raped in the aftermath of a football match by.
I mentioned that.
I mentioned that in one chapter, ultras, ultras, like people who kind of look a little bit like kind of like minded, serious fans like office.
So.
So it was indeed a, you know, a very interesting balancing act that they were able to achieve during the revolution, that there was for a year there.
There was this exceptional moment when they somehow tried to to be both very active and very forward
looking and and like doing all these things and affecting all this change without looking political.
But then they somehow lost that ability and then they sort of also became very marginalised from the revolutionary struggle.
And I'm sort of make an argument and a conclusion that this might be a way of this might be something
that we might want to considering for the for the revolutionary movement as a whole in Egypt,
that there was always this this assumption that the revolution should be nationalist for the whole
people and not really political in that sense of being for a faction of a certain class or something,
in 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.
And I know that you and other researchers are doing work on the end of the post
revolution of how people deal with the letdown from the revolution that was defeated.
And, you know, for the ultras, I guess nothing of the revolution was their shining moment.
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,
a lot of people are not living in Egypt anymore or moving on to some other type of career.
People are getting growing older. So, you know, most of these people were in their early 20s at the time.
Now during their early 30s. And you know very well, I think on that rather sad note, we're going to have to end.
Yeah, it's been wonderful talking to you. I look at your station.
I will enjoy reading the book, which I suspect is quite similar to the dissertation, which was actually one of the best ones I've read.
I've been speaking with author Carl Raml about his book, Egypt's Football Revolution Emotion, Masculinity and Uneasy Politics.
And this has been Middle East centre book talk. Thank you for listening and goodbye from Oxford.