The Beautiful Game on a Muslim Pitch

This book showcases how football and religion are increasingly coming together in Muslim contexts to interact with and influence both identity and society. The first part of the volume is devoted to issues of identity, showing how football aids in its construction, maintenance and subversion. The second part reveals the deep-rooted connections between football and political and religious establishments by demonstrating how these establishments frequently use the game to disseminate or propagate their larger messages. Taken together, the book reveals how football has increasingly become a site for confrontations and negotiations over different understandings of religion – as a racial category, as gendered power, and as it is invested in issues of state politics.