The. I just went to the door, but I could tell that he was exhausted.
As usual, he was sitting behind a worn out wooden desk in a small pharmacy in the fringes of old Cairo,
the sprawling lower income neighbourhood that covers large parts of the southern perimeter's.
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 extra pills and syrups on the glass shelves,
covering the walls around the. A steady stream of visitors was calling for his attention by Nafees painkillers, drama,
hair gel, checking their blood pressure and asking to for 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, I worked five, six, even 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.
Hamouda 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 Zamalek supporter for more than 20 years, he 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 just 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 than the course,
Hamouda had no personal relation to anyone who had been present in Portsea nonetheless, as a devoted football supporter.
The tragedy affected him profoundly. In face of the unfathomable that had befallen.
We drank our tea in silence. Hamada fiddled with a piece of paper, his gaze remote and tired.
For one, the words I came up with a suggestion,
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.
Tremendous reaction was first one of confusion.
But then he smiled at me, almost embarrassed and said, and 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 tournament in the 1990s and 2000s?
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.
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 youth.
Welcome to Middle East Centre Book Talk, the action podcast on new books about the Middle East.
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.
My name is Walter Armours. I teach Strathbogie of the Middle East in the Middle East Studies Programme at the University of Oxford.
Our speaker for this podcast is Khalil Bromell.
Khalil did his Ph.D. in anthropology at the school Oriental and African Studies.
I know him from having been his external examiner.
He finished in twenty fifteen, after which he had a post-doctoral fellowship for a year at present from Modugno Oriente in Berlin,
followed by researcher 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 the project, as I understand it, is to understand changes in relations between people and locations in the Mediterranean region.
Karl'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.
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 a dissertation 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 out there and that failure is not going to follow.
Every 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, say?
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 study Arabic back in 2007 and 2008,
and it's 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 people seem 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 touching on the topic.
And then obviously, this thing is Amalek thing, these two big clubs.
Right. So when I a couple of years later, wanted to set up a research project for.
This was something I wanted to do something about trying to sort of interrogate 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 speech in late 2010, and just a few months later, of course,
the revolution happened in January 2011, Panopto that the field sort of transformed beyond recognition.
So instead of studying this when I came to Cairo for my actual fieldwork, is that a main feature of this book?
What's 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 extreme 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 all.
We used to like football in the past, but nowadays we don't really care that much about the game anymore.
So instead of starting 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 and transition.
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.
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.
What was important about football 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 in the last five years before the revolution, from 2006 until 2011, 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 the African Champions League.
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 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 that football only satellite television channels.
Football was also extremely present in popular culture and pop songs and in the movies in this period.
And then, of course, you had all these great results and the Egyptian 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 big what I call a football bubble that sort of encapsulated
the nation and made football a very central feature 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,
look, we had to be feel strongly for football is what is an emotional high ground the game.
And what was to cut a long story short?
One of the most important things about this, what is about the Mubarak family embodied this normal guy who was not necessarily very intellectual,
looked 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 team to winning all the time.
So it was a successful version of the Egyptian nation, which was very normalised and which the Mubarak family could tap into,
and hence became a very important part of the sort of soft power of the old regime, I suppose.
OK, 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 revealing about something?
I think it's it's a great question and it's spending like three chapters in the book trying
to talk about the Ultra's role in the revolution in men 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 in 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 securitised and persecuted by
the police forces that 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 revolution of the ultras, what was bigger than that?
It was also which I just mentioned as a way of challenging the way the emotional
political babble that that football 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 of challenging the way in which football had been media
ties and supported and picked up by the regime and by establishment actors in the run up to the revolution.
So the Egypt football revolution that I'm talking about,
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.
It was also this emotional 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 in the book. You know, it's brilliant sort of dissecting the politics of Egyptian football,
but the politics are refracted through masculinity and emotion, which are mentioned in the title of the book.
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?
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.
It is obvious that football becomes this powerful vehicle for mobilisation because it's such an emotional thing that draws people into this world.
But I also think there is something 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 certain ways, but also feel in certain ways for the nation I'm using.
I'm picking up a lot of Stoller's work affected states affected most.
And I'm 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 football and also for the nation.
But that is also always a volatile type of politics because you cannot never really control emotions.
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 for me, this is in the case of football, it's definitely not the case.
You are supposed to feel very strongly for the football team.
And the ultras are all about creating a strong emotional performance and strong emotional communities at the stadium.
That's that's what it's all about.
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 the main thing. All the people that interlocutor's, the ultras, friends,
they always talk about how that this is the best thing that they can do, the thing that, like, they love themselves to do.
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,
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.
And this perhaps is a way to kind of gesture towards where it leads in the end,
because I know that you 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 sort of merge with the politics? You know, 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 revolution in motion, masculinity and uneasy politics.
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.
But the much more emphasis now in the book is this way in which.
Well, as far as 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 of 72 hour response in Portsea on the 1st of February 2012.
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 tell 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 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, the space of joy and freedom and pleasure and politics with all these uneasy connotations of uncertainty,
of violence, of 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 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 in many different ways and how that has led over time to football
becoming more and more difficult to feel for and care for in the way people did before 2011.
And as I say in the postscript, which deals with the last two years, twenty, eighteen and twenty or twenty,
eighteen and twenty nineteen, when Egypt reached the World Cup in 2018 and hosted African Cup of Nations 2019, this thing started.
This ambivalence is still there, even though Mohammed Salaf, 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, 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 the during the Revolutionary War.
So there is this anxiety that I'm trying to to delineate in the book in several chapters to more linked questions.
First of all, are you continuing to do research on football specifically?
We're moving into new directions. And secondly, if one were I mean, your book is brilliant.
I mean, it's a brilliant book based on a brilliant dissertation, which I loved reading.
But is it the last word of football, if one were to continue doing 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 I'm 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 these 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.
I think. And 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 and over hundreds more than one hundred years.
There is something there with with the way in which football is coded us as Muslim,
but also about obviously some sort of discrimination at many multiple levels.
That makes no, 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. I'm not exactly sure what like and in terms of fan culture, the Ultras are not really there anymore.
I was just allowing the biggest oppressed group was dissolved in twenty eighteen.
So they they just don't exist, all dressed as white knights.
But just the 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 a lot of that, although, of course,
at the same time, this hesitancy for football to come back is 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.
Anything else you want to say?
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.
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 by the media and by the establishment
actors that they were trying to when they were trying to revolutionise Egyptian political data,
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,
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,
or by saying that we are pure nationalist and everyone else, we are fighting for the good of the whole people,
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,
in the revolutionary transition, they managed to pull off this sort of balancing act between being a very forceful force and doing a
lot of things and 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 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 mention that I mentioned that in one chapter after ultras,
like people who kind of look a little bit like kind of like the serious fans like office perhaps.
So.
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.
There was this exceptional moment when they somehow tried to be both very active and very forward
looking and like doing all these things and effecting 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 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,
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.
And I know that you and other researchers are doing work on the end of the post
revolution and sort of how people deal with the let down revolution that was defeated.
And, you know, for the elections, I guess nothing of a 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 and older in their early 30s.
And, you know. Well, I think on that rather sad note, we're going to have to end.
Yeah, it's been wonderful talking to you. I love reading the station.
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.
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.