“Not just a game”: Power,politics,and media coverage of Qatar's World Cup 2022

Introduction

In the 1960s when CLR James wrote Beyond a Boundary, his memoir on the game of cricket, he articulately explored the contentious relationship between colonization, racism, and sports and ‘broke the barriers of race, class, and empire, [but …] the book could not, at first, find a publisher’ (James, 2013), says Selma James. James would go on to lead a decade-long and relentless journalistic campaign for the legendary cricketer Frank Worrell to become the captain of the West Indies cricket team. The unthinkable happened by defying systemic racism which, at the time, imposed a racial hierarchy that assigned team members’ positions based on race and denied colored players the opportunity to ever have such a leadership role on their teams; they could be the best player, but they could not lead. Around the same period, in the Summer Olympics in Mexico City ‘American sprinters [and medalists] John Carlos and Tommie Smith orchestrated a silent protest on the Olympic podium’ (Aziz, 2018) against racism in the United States. They were both ‘booed by the crowd, widely denounced back home and the two were subsequently expelled from the Games’ (Aziz, 2018). Capturing the overlapping ideologies of sports and colonial racial politics, the events that transpired in October 1968, Mexico City reveal the conventional attitudes that were assumed unique to that period and its racial socio-cultural inequalities. ¹

The intertwined legacy of sports and racism, however, would emerge again as a fixed feature that shapes western media coverage when, in 2010, another unthinkable event as described by French news happened and triggered a decade-long series of hostile attacks against another group of racialized people, Qatari Arabs. Immediately after winning the 2022 FIFA World Cup bid, Qatar appeared regularly in western media and news. However, as many reporters observed, ‘media coverage [was] underpinned by prejudices based in racism, Orientalism and Islamophobia’ (Nereim, 2022). Shifting between classical racism and ‘race-less’ racism, western anger against Qatar masquerading as criticism was escalating, circulated in expressions of Islamophobic prejudice and rhetoric of irreducible differences both in terms of cultural and religious values, and as this article contends, took a cultural turn. That is, instead of interrogating the opacity of FIFA's (including its members) organizational practices, the transparency of its decision-making processes, or the veracity of its Lex Sportiva, the critique reductively shifted to the identity, cultural norms, and social values of the host country. In other words, the justifiable structural and organization critique was transformed ideologically and uncritically into a civilizational critique. Historically, French satirical criticism has a reputation for ‘hiding hatred behind free speech and humor’ (Congar, 2023), they would go a step further beyond subtle language to prove the extent to which racial stereotypes have tainted Qatar's World Cup criticism; The French newspaper Le Canard enchainé published a cartoon ‘depicting Qatari footballers as terrorists’ (Aljazeera.com, 2022a) (Figure 1). This image was one of many other insidious ethno-cultural visual depictions of Arabs that not only confirms the racist character of attacks as criticism but also shows the interconnectedness between these recurring episodes of western rage and imagination.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Racist humor: ‘Qatari footballers as terrorists’.

Within the context of these reductive and essentializing racialized representations, the article identifies possible prejudicial ideological practices that expose the way Qatar was singled out compared to other European and North American organizers as ‘a regionally or nationally exceptional site of racialized discrimination’ (Babar and Vora, 2022: 501). For example, even though the ‘construction companies operating in Qatar are not only regional, but also from the UK, Netherlands, France and other countries’ (Ennis, 2022), nevertheless criticism of potential workers’ exploitation and abuse were being ‘exoticized as something uniquely [and culturally] Qatari’ (Ennis, 2022). To this end, the article draws on postcolonial theory and qualitative and discursive content analysis and argues that the racialized and systematic cultural disparagement of the ‘Arab’ and ‘Muslim’ Qatari identity in popular media narratives during the 2022 FIFA World Cup was in fact a form of neo-colonial anxiety intended to disavow the ‘menacing presence’ of Europe's cultural other within its presumed civilizational domain. While concerns and questions about FIFA's sports governance, decision-making, and accountability are of crucial significance in general, they are beyond the scope of this article, as they deserve in-depth analysis that cannot be accommodated within the confines of this project. Accordingly, this article will focus primarily on the media tropes and narratives that underlie the racialized and civilizational discourse mobilized against Qatar's hosting the FIFA 2022 World cup.

Conceptual framework

The enduring legacy of western colonial and orientalist ideology has profoundly shaped its perceived ‘sacred’ civilizational character. The West's colonial civilizational campaigns throughout the 18th and 19th centuries would be carried out by a military and imperial doctrine infused with moral universalism, intellectual superiority, and racial triumphalism unparalleled in modern history. No ideological or political project prior to this vision had the conviction in the systematic salvation of humanity from its non-European cultural other and endeavored to guide it (morally and politically) according to its will, as did this doctrine. Recapturing the colonial civilizational tropes from the colonial era and re-marshaling the viewpoint of the uniqueness of western values and practices, the West would rediscover old ideologies in new expressions. The manifestation of this ideological vision was most articulated in the ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, in which the West is staged as undergoing an epochal cosmic clash with its (undeveloped) civilizational other. The FIFA World Cup 2022 hosted by the State of Qatar illustrates the essence of this ideological formation as it represents one of the most recent iterations of this entrenched legacy of the differentiation between Europe and its cultural ‘other’. The twentieth-century colonial vision of global imaginative geography in which Europe inhabits its singular and privileged essence would re-emerge in the cultural and racial boundaries that designate the ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ of global modernity's civilizational grand achievements. The systematic and widespread denunciation of Qatar's hosting the 2022 FIFA World Cup was not confined to plausible organizational, legal or logistical matters, but was profoundly articulated, as will be demonstrated below, in the discursive strategies of civilizational difference that confirm and reinforce the ‘European brand of cultural production versus the moral and cultural inferiority of the non-West’ (Al-Zo’by, 2022: 72). In this context, the West's ideological project to subsume and assimilate the non-West within the sphere of the Eurocentric worldview (a long standing imperial cultural policy), is paradoxically and viscerally resisted when the non-western ‘intrudes’ on the ‘exclusive’ and ‘proper’ domain of European cultural signifiers of authority. It seems, accordingly, that ‘the destiny of those [non-western] regions has been to [simply] mimic, never quite successfully, the history already performed by the West’ (Mitchell, 2000: 1). Thus, the conventional western dominant paradigm is premised on an unresolved dialectic where western cultural epistemologies are represented as the universal judgment of rationality, reason, and global principles but the non-western, conversely, are seen as constrained by the cultural afflictions of local habits, beliefs, and ideology, and therefore unfit to conceive, demand, and produce universal cultural ideas and practices.

Beyond the legitimate concerns about the organizational practices during the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which did not differ dramatically from previous FIFA World Cup hosts (Russia, Brazil, South Africa, Germany, etc.), Qatar's successful bid, and impressive delivery of the event on the world stage posed an imminent threat, it seems, to Europe's singular monopoly of cultural and historical universal principles. Furthermore, western hostile sentiments which were fueled by the complicities of racialized difference and Orientalized inferiority (being Arab, Muslim, Asian, brown), Qatar as the embodiment of both from a European perspective, became the cultural imposter that destabilizes its latent cultural neo-imperial discourse. Qatar's hosting the FIFA World Cup at once locates it at the heart of Europe yet dislocates Europe's practices. In other words, Qatar seems to mimic yet subvert Europe's cultural and racial dominance.

In charting out the cultural turn that has animated the public and popular narratives about Qatar hosting the FIFA World Cup, it is clear that this highly charged racial discourse is in essence an expression of Europe's anxiety about the menacing presence of the ‘cultural other’ within the presumed exclusive domain of the West's privileged traditions. Hence, the dramatic shift from organizational and logistical critique to cultural denunciation is intended to reestablish the hierarchy and order of cultural and civilizational domination long enjoyed by Europe precisely at the moment when the West can be at once reproduced but subverted from without. We are fully aware, however, that the simple act of including and transposing the non-western within the prevailing hegemonic western cultural framework poses the risk of inadvertently reaffirming the primacy of the West's global singularity, and paradoxically reconfirming its domination. Nonetheless, and in order to subvert and disrupt western hegemonic monopoly on universal discourse it is insufficient to simply critique its mode of cultural production through alternative facile indigenization. Rather, it is more critical to re-appropriate and reshape Eurocentric western accounts of global values across various cultural, historical, and geographical differences beyond Europe while never disavowing the local's claim to universality. In other words, the intrinsic and dichotomous separation between the universal and the local at the heart of the western claim of civilization must be overcome within the realization that both the local and the universal are not diametrically opposed.

Although this complex and interlocking process is not unique to this situation, the Qatar FIFA World Cup provided one of the most pronounced articulations of this contested terrain. In his explication of a similar dynamic process within the context of various historical colonial experiences, Homi Bhabha introduces the notion of ‘mimicry and hybridity’ to illustrate how colonized or marginalized people often mimic the cultural codes, practices, and methods of the dominant narratives and structures as a means for both survival and subtle subversion at once. Mimicry, in Bhabha's formulation, is never an exact repetition or replication; rather, it involves a subtle alteration, variation, and addition, and therefore a subversion of the dominant structure. This process of mimicry reflects the ambivalence of hegemonic discourse (whether colonial, neo-colonial, or Eurocentric), as it simultaneously reinforces hegemonic power structures while also undermining them by introducing difference and hybridity. Hybrid practices, then, create complex ambiguities that disrupt and disturb the authoritative and authorized dominant representations of self and other. Under the camouflage of hybridity, therefore, the essentialist ideology on which the dominant culture is premised is deconstructed from within. The presence of the formerly excluded ‘other’ within mainstream (dominant) culture ‘contaminates’ the purity of its civilizational discourse, and thus its totality.

Bhabha's notion and reflections on mimicry and hybridity within the context of power difference have provided significant insights for understanding the cultural and social agency of historically marginalized communities. Accordingly, his ideas provide the tools to analyze how subaltern or non-European societies negotiate their identities in the face of colonial domination and how they engage with the dominant culture in ways that are at once imaginative, imitative and transformative (Bhabha, 1994). For him, ‘colonial mimicry is the desire for a reformed, recognizable ‘Other’, as a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite’ (Bhabha, 1994: 122). Ironically, this mode of cultural subjectivity can neither be original ‘by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor identical—by virtue of the difference that defines it’ (Bhabha, 1994: 107); nonetheless, this ambivalence is precisely what articulates its power. Hence, the power of mimicry does not reside in its radical opposition to colonial power, or the concealing of a ‘genuine’ identity beneath a masquerade; rather, it emanates for its ‘double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its authority’ (Bhabha, 1984: 129) and as such, exposes its limitation. In essence, these critical instances of ‘mimicry and mockery’ capture the power of possibility for the non-European to destabilize and transform the structure of colonial ideological system, and thus potentially place a considerable political and ideological uncertainty in the order of imperial western dominance.

While for some this- ‘difference through imitation’- type of process may initially appear as a form of accommodation to the hegemonic cultures, they in fact create hybrid forms of cultural expressions that simultaneously trouble and reside outside the control of dominant authority. It is our strong contention in this article that the racialized and systematic cultural disparagement of the Arab and Muslim Qatari identity in popular media narratives during the 2022 FIFA World Cup was in fact a form of neo-colonial anxiety intended to disavow the ‘menacing presence’ of Europe's cultural other within its civilizational domain. This intense desire to reinstate mastery and control over an ‘insurgent cultural other’ who appropriates rather inappropriately the civilizational codes, practices, habits of the ‘superior’ European brand is the foundation for this criticism. The mass mobilization of neo-orientalist media representations as well as the deployment of cultural identity as the constitution of civilizational cultural hierarchy before, during, and after the Qatar FIFA World Cup signal the discontent and disease Europe has with cultural mimicry. As a form of hegemonic apparatus linked to the formations of contemporary cultural ideology, these racialized discursive media tropes should be seen as part and parcel in the struggle to exert full domination and control over the other's cultural agency.

Methodological and analytical frameworks

In this effort to offer deeper analytical insight that explicates what we read based on specific examples and evidence as racial underpinnings in certain segments in western media coverage of Qatar's World Cup, the article does not comprehensively survey the thousands of reports, opinion pieces, commentaries, and purported investigative exposés that were written and rewritten in this regard. Instead, the article examines a variety of critical examples taken from popular print media and newspapers given that they were the main platform of discontent with Qatar's FIFA event. The selection of these examples relied on three main factors. The first is content and thematic foci that discuss the mega event in the context of Qatar's Human Rights (abuses); the second is the language used to express a hostile and singular mindset and show conformity in terms of the repetitive use of sensational words like ‘abuse, exploitation, slavery, suffering;’ and the third is the textual narratives that insist on ‘[e]xceptionalising Qatar with Orientalist, Islamophobic and racist frames’ (Ennis, 2022) making it seem like exploitation of migrant workers is not inherent to existing structures and abusive practices already normalized in the West. Subsequently, the practices that are often linked to shifting conditions of global capital, historical and colonial relations between the West and the impoverished Global South, economic inequalities, or technological progress and the commodification of labor, in the case of Qatar, were all dissolved to become an Arab cultural problem. Accordingly, the article focuses on a number of samples from the Guardian's reporting on a decade of abuse or as described by the newspaper itself ‘ten years of hurt’ (Kelly, 2022). Additionally, the article examines a variety of samples from BBC, CNN, NPR, and Reuters that illustrate the pervasive and persistent cultural turn in the critique of Qatar's 2022 FIFA World Cup. Despite being known for representing different political orientations and agendas, these news networks’ coverage of 2022 Qatar World Cup, as the analysis below will show, was almost identical. The methodology, hence, draws on qualitative content analysis to identify the racial layers in so many different newspaper articles and fragments and thoroughly explain the spectacular antagonist position that popular western media, British and American in particular, took against Qatari Arabs.

In gathering and examining the examples and fragments from print media coverage for this analysis, the article had to take into consideration eliminating repetitive narratives and focused on texts that a) made direct or subtle references to racial and cultural differences, b) used inflammatory imagery of metaphors (see Figure 4 - the camel map), and c) concealed reductive meanings about Arabs, Arab culture or Islam that we were able to extract and interpret in the context of racial politics and/or colonial discourse. In many of these fragments, there were indications of visceral reactions and hostility towards Arabs as organizers of a global event as pronounced, for example, in the following statements published by the Guardian: ‘giving the World Cup to Qatar was a mistake. It doesn’t belong there’ (Lahm, 2022). Or, worse ‘I hate the very idea of this World Cup in Qatar’ (Bose, 2022). The analysis unpacks these and similar reductive and derogatory statements and talks through them about possible and plausible interpretations of the messages they wish to conceal but simultaneously want to convey. Relying mostly on conceptual analysis where the overlap between classical racism and ‘race-less’ racism takes place, we decode racist messages that are wrapped in advocacy preaching for different rights in the larger political and cultural power dynamics between Europe and this ‘insurgent colony’ over influence, visibility, domination, and hegemony. Very prematurely in this context of rising tension, a Guardian article asked: ‘Before World Cup Kicks off, has Qatar already lost at geopolitical football?’ (Wintour, 2022). The answer to this question is deferred to the end of the article.

Cultural alterity and western discontent

Like other wealthy western nations who regularly and aggressively compete to host such events and do not do it simply for the sports, it was no secret that the Qatari state was organizing the 2022 World Cup as a strategic investment for image-making and visibility on the world stage. ‘These sport spectacles’ (Kellner, 2001: 39), as Douglas Kellner calls them, have been transformed into billboards for influence and power displays. They are sports events that are never about sports per se. But the main problem, it seems, is that these spectacles which ‘can also be a very effective […] form of soft power’ (Besnier et al., 2018: 232), an expression of national prowess, and distinction have been ‘hijacked’ by an Arab and Muslim nation.

This was not the first time that Qatar has organized major events as a means for soft power.

Sport has provided arguably the most prominent field of activity for Qatar's global engagement […] Qatar also has hosted a plethora of major international sporting tournaments, notably: the Qatar Open Tennis Tournament, the Qatar Open Golf Masters, the 2006 Asian Games and the 2011 Asian Cup football tournament. (Brannagan and Giulianotti, 2015: 707)

It is, however, the first time that a global event such as the World Cup, gets moved out of its proper modern space. In other words, by winning the bid, Qataris trespassed ‘the boundary of the space of modernity’ (Mitchell, 2000: 16). Moving the global event to the space of Otherness is a transgression that did not sit well with the West. Months after the bid was announced and final, talk about ‘a brewing global scandal [that] may reverse a 2010 vote that rejected the U.S. bid to host the 2018 or 2022 World Cup after the tournaments were awarded to Russia and Qatar, respectively’ (Kim, 2014) continued. These claims were never substantiated and yet hundreds of articles circulated them, cited them, or mentioned them like they were proven beyond doubt. Placing the World Cup in Qatar was clearly seen as a challenge to the peripheral impasse that has historically been imposed on former colonies and a violation of boundaries. As Griffin (2019: 1000) states: ‘These colonial boundaries are not the sacred spaces they once were.’ To Arabs, Muslims, and brown people in general, colonial boundaries are eternally a profane space. Reading between the lines of these intertextual crossings and images, western media coverage becomes shackled by a domineering attitude that most likely emerges involuntarily from their ‘comforting sense of moral superiority’ (Koch, 2021) to Arabs. What is of particular interest to us here is to show the implication of some western reporting in racial politics and its own contradictions for applauding Qatari Arabs for having ‘a reputation as modernizers’ (Doherty, 2012) in their own way but seemingly their modernity, as their western critics disapproved, does not level up to western expectations. ‘They are,’ we are also told ‘a relatively conservative society’ (Sullivan, 2022). The analysis that follows addresses the subtle and complicated assumptions about Qatari Arabs, which kept changing as it became obvious that the contentions were more about disrupting existing racial and cultural hierarchies than sports and human rights.

‘L’impensable, selon des experts’: The unthinkable, according to experts

French news announced that ‘l'impensable, selon des experts’ (Merhi, 2019) just happened.

On 2 December 2010, Sepp Blatter, the former FIFA president, announced inside a Zurich conference hall that Qatar beat both Australia and the United States and won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup. There was a general malaise that characterized western media coverage of the news. Initially, it was difficult for them to articulate what exactly was causing it, except that the decision, as many argued, was shocking. ‘Shock as Qatar win vote for 2022 World Cup' (2010), says the title of one article that appeared in the Independent newspaper. Understandably, the first two concerns western media reactions immediately posed were:

a central question which then began to take the debate in different cultural and ideological directions about societies who can and cannot organize events of such global magnitude. Blatter, overwhelmed by all the media hype, 12 years later contradicted himself, reported The Guardian, and announced that ‘handing the World Cup to Qatar was a “mistake” and “a bad choice”’ (MacInnes, 2022). The question -how can a relatively small country in the Middle East host one of the biggest world's sporting events- was an introductory sentence to most articles that went on to critique Qatar for other unrelated issues to the sports event. For example, a Washington Post article calling Qatar ‘tiny’ insisted on adding more references to size saying: ‘Qatar is the smallest country ever to host the FIFA World Cup. It is dwarfed by recent hosts Russia and Brazil and by the 2026 host — the entire continent of North America’ (Mellen et al., 2023 emphasis in original). Within the context of this question a number of other concerns were emphasized about feasibility and structural requirements for the event; ‘a country so lacking in stadiums and infrastructure and history that its bid was labeled “high risk” by FIFA's own evaluators’ (Panja, 2022) says a New York Times article.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

The tabloid of propaganda as ‘ten years of hurt’.

Even though many investigative stories did uncover serious labor violations, low wages, and horrific work-related accidents, they were completely decontextualized from the lager global economy and global labor market transformations that were led by western liberal democracies and ‘the architects of a global capitalist system predicated on vast inequality, the mass trampling of rights, and the subjugation of workers’ (Fernández, 2022).

Australian Director of Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson claimed Qatar ‘treats workers so brutally’ (2013). At this same period, hundreds of brown asylum seekers were left to drown halfway between Indonesia and Christmas Island, despite having ‘made 16 calls for help to Australia's maritime safety authority over two days’ (Hill, 2013). To these and many more raised issues, Qatar presented the necessary and detailed steps to rectify labor policies particularly the infamous Kafala system, which as The Guardian observers reported, ‘led to labour mobility [adding] now workers can negotiate for better conditions, and employers are incentivised to provide them in order to attract and retain talent’ (The Guardian, 2022). Similarly, Qatar introduced new laws that eliminated exit permits requirements for most workers, approved procedures allowing workers to change employment freely, initiated a non-discriminatory minimum wage, established a Workers’ Support and Insurance Fund, among other new policies (Government Communications Office, 2024). But, because the real issues were not about any ‘rights’, there was nothing that Qatar or any Arabs could have done to garner western approval.

Unmodern and modern cultures

It was CLR James who first challenged the fallacy of superior and inferior cultures’ binaries among many other colonized thinkers along with Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi, Edward Said, and Frantz Fanon. In his book The Black Jacobins (1989), he indirectly questioned the coercive structures of oppression and found the imposed singularity of history unsettling. Echoing Marx, he wrote ‘Great men make history. But only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment (James, 1989: x). With the same convictions, in Culture and Imperialism (1994), Edward Said contested the futility of the ‘activated imperial divide’ (1994: 50) between the West and its other ‘peripheral’ world. Paying close attention to historical specificities, Said centers his critique on the complicity of culture with the imperial enterprise. He says:

In time, culture comes to be associated, often aggressively, with the nation or the state; this differentiates ‘us’ from ‘them,’ almost always with some degree of xenophobia. Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather combative one at that, as we see in recent ‘returns’ to culture and tradition. (Said, 1994, xiii)

The year 2010 punctuates yet another crucial moment in the intersecting categories between geopolitics and sports with central questions emerging about the role of western culture ‘in shaping imperial dynamic’ (Said, 1994: 107). This role materializes by ‘pretending to universalism, assume and incorporate the inequality of races, the subordination of inferior cultures, the acquiescence of those who, in Marx's words, cannot represent themselves and therefore must be represented by others’ (Said, 1994: 277). Hence, highlighting a willingness to tolerate what never ceases to be an old, unchanging, and archaic belief system called Islamic culture, had to be widely broadcasted urging us to accept that Qatar is an ‘Islamic country with a very different set of cultural norms to our own’ (Rawlinson, 2022). At the same time, in most of The Guardian articles, the savior discourse was parading how the West came to the rescue of ‘dying’ workers who cannot represent or protect themselves, not from the immortality of imperialist continuities that impoverish them in the present, but from the abuses of these unmodern Arab and Muslim oppressors.

Here the rescue mission was romanticized and deliberately attached to broader discussions of cultural differences, but without making it obvious that the invocation of the cultural question which, as some sober western critics observed, ‘has its roots in the Orientalist discourse of the colonial era’ (Wearing, 2022); in its layers, it entailed a juxtaposition between ‘an enlightened west encountering the backward despotisms of the Middle East’ (Wearing, 2022), and as the many civilizational missions promised, the Middle East must be altered and reformed with the guidance of benevolent western directives. This hostile campaign against Qatari Arabs however, tried to sustain a ‘self-serving mythology [which] externalizes and circumscribes the blame for human rights abuses in states like Qatar, while preserving a narcissistic sense of western innocence’ (Wearing, 2022). It is this innocence that the West wants to rediscover, as The Guardian's articles unconsciously bypass the cultural question and make it take on a different dimension to become the racial slate upon which western racism could ‘justifiably’ write and re-write itself in latent or open forms. With western innocence unattainable, rage towards Arabs became the alternative to vent out. At times, statements describing Qatari culture were so banal and meaningless it was hard to believe they got published. A CNN article says: ‘swearing and making rude gestures are considered obscene acts in Qatar’ (Woodyatt, 2022). Is this really the intellectual limit of addressing cultural difference?

Qataris, on the other hand, aware of their real violation, firmly proceeded with their plan to go ‘a long way to give the event a distinctly Arab and Muslim flavor’ (Ebrahim and Al Lawati, 2022, emphasis added), celebrate the local, and attempt to suspend, even briefly, the visibility of the universal and western recognizable brands. On the level of logistics, this means also dictating rules and regulations, making sure local norms and practices are respected, and enforcing certain behavioral codes according to a cultural register the West sees as archaic and inferior. Qatar's political and cultural landscape (its small population and status as a wealthy Gulf state) are exceptionally helpful to the state's goals to explore and spend on different fields of influence. Therefore, its consistent policy to invest in sports and education, the construction of sports facilities, youth development programs, and initiatives to educate health and wellness in Arab communities, beyond the World Cup fanfare and the country's borders, earned the small nation a certain degree of influence and credibility in the Arab region. Starting in the 1970s with ‘the hosting of the Gulf Cup in 1976 […], Qatar's first attempt to express its national identity among the countries of the Gulf region’ (Reiche, 2014: 4) and holding a decade later in 1988 the continental football championship, ‘the Asian Football Cup [and] the first major Asian sport event in Qatar’ (Reiche, 2014: 4), Doha would further enhance its status worldwide by hosting several annual sport events. In 1993, Qatar hosted more prestigious games with the ‘ATP tennis tournament being the first’ (Boucek, 2024). Undoubtedly continuing to capitalize on such status and miss no opportunity to generate any level of soft power, Qatari officials worked hard on giving Qatar's FIFA World Cup, for the first time in the Arab region's history, an Arab/Islamic character that both the Gulf populations and Arab masses in general would appreciate. This initiative entailed the construction of a great variety of stadiums with architectural designs that are nomadically and Islamically inspired. For example, Al Bayt Stadium is a stunning Bedouin tent-like space where the spectacular opening ceremony of Qatar's FIFA took place on 20 November 2022, and as one observer reported made ‘Arab culture take centre stage’ (Salari, 2022). Certain international media networks recognized Qatar's aim to emphasize the visibility of Arab heritage. ‘Deutsch Press Agency (DPA), said that Qatar has organised a dazzling opening ceremony to the 22nd Football World Cup, pointing to the various numbers that blended Qatari tradition with international modernity’ (Gulf Times, 2022).

Going beyond catering to Arab and Muslim audiences, Qatar made sure its welcome and openness is also extended to the larger global community. Qatar's emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani in his opening statement highlighted Qatar's careful attention to inclusivity saying: ‘how lovely it is that people can put aside what divides them to celebrate their diversity and what brings them together’ (Furcoi, 2022). Qatar paid meticulous attention to every single detail that could enhance the local brand of this particular FIFA event including an imaginary flying Qatari mascot called La’eeb (meaning very skilled soccer player) dressed in the local white Dishdasha with a gutra and agal (a traditional headcover for men in the Gulf region) (see Figure 3).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

La’eeb (Furcoi, 2022).

On the ground, Qatar has engaged with local communities and Arab nations to foster a sense of ownership and participation in the World Cup. This includes initiatives to involve neighboring countries in the event and promote tourism by making visa processing easy and accessible to most visitors. ‘Fans from Morocco, Tunisia, Qatar and Saudi Arabia congregate in the evenings to have one big party. Even Egyptians, Algerians, Lebanese and Omani fans [were in Doha], even though their teams didn’t even qualify for the tournament. But nobody cares’ (Adil, 2022).

Fury and the ‘bisht’

Qatar dismissed the ‘bashing campaign of criticism of its 2022 bid as anti-Arab prejudice’ (Irish and Bakr, 2015) but nevertheless, the bashing never stopped. The BBC, which was less critical of Russia's 2018 bid, refused to air the opening ceremony in Qatar of what it considered ‘a controversial World Cup […and] declined to [even] explain why it had shunted coverage of the opening ceremony’ (Waterson, 2022). An ‘article in one British tabloid decried Qatar's “savage” laws’ (Nereim, 2022) and a TV presenter describes Arab culture as ‘an abomination’ (Nereim, 2022). The escalating rage confirmed that the small Arab nation stood for a much bigger geography than its actual size. Other Arabs quickly realized that the tarnishing of Qatar was perplexing and way beyond constructive criticism. Many pledged their support unconditionally.

At a recent game in Iraq, fans from the Baghdad-based Air Force club unfurled a banner saying: ‘We stand with Qatar 2022.’ An Arab League meeting in Algiers even included in its final declaration a rejection of ‘the malicious campaigns of distortion and skepticism’ that affect [the tournament] (Wintour, 2022).

But western media hostility was never deterred, and the myth of rescue continued.

From 2010 and until the 2022 World Cup ended, media attacks appeared in one of three contexts: the first was an exaggerated doubt about Qatar's ability to host such a global event with questions about preparedness, infrastructure, or organizational logistics that could be too challenging for the ‘small’ nation to handle. The second and possibly angriest, seemingly coming from the most suppressed white supremacist voices, with texts that have very little interpretive substance and strong visceral inclinations sensing that something does not feel right about Arabs hosting the World Cup as argued by Nick Miller, the author of ‘6 reasons why the World Cup should be taken away from Qatar’ (Miller, 2014). Miller recommends other ‘deserving nations’ but does not name them and reiterates the same position of the ‘unthinkable’ happening. He exclaims: ‘if it was in the plot of a film, it would be laughed off as utterly implausible’ (Miller, 2014). Outraged at the very idea that Arabs would host such an event, Barney Ronay from The Guardian declares that Qatar's World Cup is ‘the most divisive, brutal, mindbogglingly corrupt sporting event of the modern age is now upon us’ (Ronay, 2022). On his twitter account, Ronay would later circulate another racist World Cup poster with stereotypical depictions of Arab landscape and wealthy-oil Sheikhs (see Figure 4) that he describes as ‘brilliantly simple’ (Ronay, 2022).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

The hate map: camels, desert, and dehumanization.

The third and last context is the emphasis placed on what western critics consider the ‘conservative level of Islam in the country’ when in fact this is more an expression of anxiety regarding a possible shifting ground of cultural influence that has traditionally been considered a western domain.

The ‘bisht’ incident was the last straw that shattered some irrationally angry critics’ egos to pieces. During the World Cup closing ceremony the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani dressed Lionel Messi in the traditional ‘bisht’ used by dignitaries and elites in the Gulf region for special occasions as ‘a gesture of high honour and appreciation. Honour for who he is and what he symbolises in the world of football, appreciation for his wizardry on the field and what he has done for the sport’ (Al Sherbini, 2022). Of course, there was more to this gesture than the honoring of the legendary soccer player. In the words of Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary-general of Qatar's World Cup organizing committee, the event was an ‘opportunity to showcase to the world our Arab and Muslim culture. This was not about Qatar, it was a regional celebration’ (What is a bisht, Aljazeera, 2022b). The fury unleashed in the West could not have been imagined. Immediately, the gesture was labeled as ‘inappropriate and even manipulative’ (Al Sherbini, 2022). Some called it ‘bizarre moment’ (Rudling, 2022). The British Mail Online magazine called it a ‘selfish moment [claiming] Qatar World Cup hosts force Lionel Messi to cover up his iconic No.10 shirt with an Arabic robe’ (Rudling, 2022). Fox sports headline called the act of honoring Messi ‘Absolutely grim’ (foxsports.com, 2022) and BBC presenter, Gary Lineker expressed his disappointment at not being able to see Messi's shirt saying, ‘a shame, in a way, that they’ve covered up Messi in his Argentina shirt,’ (Jones and Pawley, 2022). What is really a shame is this clear frustration which hides in the layers of these Islamophobic comments and these irrepressible western urges to force the homogenization of global culture. But these reactions are coming from observers and critics who ‘fed on sport as evidence of their countries and race's immanent superiority’ (Besnier et al., 2018: 63). These reactions that sealed the decade-long media rage against Arabs seem to be still anchored in a colonial/racial nexus and reveal a profound sense of nostalgic western attachment to colonial legacies that burst out impulsively whenever the West feels its former colonial subjects are acting up or daring to reverse the order of races and things. For example, sports photographer for The Guardian, Tom Jenkins depicted FIFA opening night in Al Bayt Stadium as ‘Qatar's dour start’ (Jenkins, 2022). A few weeks later, when the spectacular performance of the Moroccan team made global news, Moroccan players came under racial attacks. Danish TV host Christian Høgh Andersen, on Danish TV2 News ‘draws a line between staying together as a family to the next topic about animals’ (TV2 Communications, 2022) ‘unintentionally’ comparing Moroccan players and their mothers with monkeys (Figure 5).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

Moroccan monkeys, Outrage at ‘racist’ Danish TV, (Doha News, 2022a).

Troubled by a very common gesture in Arab culture and among Muslims in general symbolizing the belief in the oneness of God, when Moroccan players raised their index fingers, ‘a German television anchor compared ‘the Moroccan national team with the Islamic State militant group (ISIS)’ (Doha News, 2022b).

Conclusion

In his characterization of bourgeois colonial ideology over half a century ago, Aimé Césaire described the pathological logic that underlies the cultural laws of distinction for political violence between so called ‘civilized’ adversaries versus ‘uncivilized’ ones. Reflecting on Europe's utter outrage against Germany's cultural war methods during WWII, Césaire observed that European's profound indignation was founded contemptuously on ‘the fact that [Germany] applied to Europe the colonial practices that had previously been applied only to the Arabs of Algeria, the colonies of India and the Negroes of Africa’ (Césaire, 1995: 12). Almost seventy years after Césaire's remarkable insight, Europe's desire to distinguish itself as the domain of universal modernity's racialized traditions persists, albeit in cultural terms. Europe's cultural outrage against Qatar, it seems, was constructed on the presumed transgression that the ‘colony’ dared to act like ‘Europe’, however, irreverently. As stated above, the cultural ideology that has animated the popular and mainstream discourse against Qatar's hosting the FIFA World Cup was primarily intended to reestablish the hierarchy and order of cultural and civilizational domination long enjoyed by the West. As Said in his seminal work Orientalism demonstrated, classical orientalism as an ideology was not just an intellectual field of inquiry in which the east was represented as irrational, inferior, backward, and exotic, but more dangerously as a form of cultural apparatus that justified direct colonial and military interventions in Asia and Africa, and could ‘contain the Orient in its military, economic, and above all, cultural arms’ (Said, 1978: 156). While the representational strategies of orthodox and classical orientalism might have changed, its essential features and ideology endure in the persistent discursive paradigm of its evolving ‘belligerent neo-Orientalism’ (Said, 2003) expressed in the new ideological tropes entrenched in everyday cultural politics and popular narratives. Whether in its orthodox form, or its neo-orientalist form, the heightened, widespread, and negative media and popular narratives of Qatar's World Cup are profoundly intertwined with the West's desire to control as well as its will to dominate. Nevertheless, with a very generous budget, great planning, and perfect delivery, Qatar, at least for a certain period of time before and during the games, managed to destabilize existing Western hegemony and temporarily garner great global attention.