Abstract

Excerpted From: Khaled A. Beydoun, The World Cup as a Racial Rebuilt Project, 2025 Utah Law Review 805 (2025) (292 Footnotes) (Full Document).

The World Cup in Qatar unfolded at the crossroads of shifting political currents. Less than a year after the tournament, the region descended back into war and ethnic cleansing marked by “genocidal acts” currently unfolding in Gaza. The real time images of mass death scrolling across terrestrial television screens and digital timelines restored the damning stereotypes of the region, chilling the season of hope that unfolded ten months earlier in Qatar. A season that, during the darkest passages of human suffering in Gaza that has claimed the lives of more than 40,000 Palestinians at the time of this writing, signal that the possibility for peace--and piecing together fractures and fragments of identity--may be more achievable through sport than war or diplomacy. On the soccer field, Palestine made history in Qatar on January 28, 2024, claiming its first ever Asia Cup victory as their countrymen and women were being besieged in Gaza, rekindling the passage of hope that unfolded on that very field a year ago at the World Cup.

Much like the renewed identity of Palestine that took shape on the soccer pitch as the war in Gaza unfolded, the identity of the World Cup took on a radically new form in Qatar. The spectacle would be the first hosted by an Arab or Muslim nation, bringing the sport's highest stage to a region associated more with struggle than soccer. While billions turned their attention Middle Eastward for the 2022 World Cup, the “War on Terror” and its entwined narratives of White anxiety and supremacy drove mounting “intersectionality” or culture wars on the Western front.

Across the United States, the furor of popular protests demolished statutes of colonial figures. While longstanding symbols of American apartheid were removed, the new movements demanding racial equity raised up novel colors of American and Western identity. In real-time, the identity of the West was being remade as old idols came crashing down in parks and public squares where bold new movements stormed in with bullhorns and protest placards. Critical Race Theory (CRT), an academic discourse previously confined to academia, trickled into the streets and onto tongues as the language of racial reimagination.

In Arab nations, where a new season of dictatorships chilled the spring of revolutions past, crises around identity likewise stood at the center. The region was fractured by the War on Terror, and Arab peoples found themselves trapped at the crosshairs of upstart authoritarian orders, political disorder, identity crisis, and mounting death tolls in Gaza. Arabs in the region--and diaspora populations in the United States, Europe, and beyond-- struggled for self-determination and self-definition. They yearned for a place to belong in American racial orders, which lodged them between formal Whiteness and terror suspicion, and Arab lands where the stain of colonialism, modern imperialism, and mercurial dictators kept them in existential flux.

Unlike the Black and Brown legions that brought down idols of “White supremacy” in Western cities, Arab identity remained deeply segmented. The cross-currents of religious sectarianism, dissonant geopolitical allegiances, proxy wars, and the protracted War on Terror deepened divides among Arab peoples. The latter vision of a unified, transnational Arab identity--or “Pan Arabism”--seemed a matter of romantic nostalgia. It remained a relic of a bygone era only injected into the present by the haunting revolution of an Umm Kalthoum record, which spun memories of an Arabism that faded into silence.

Six decades after the fall of Pan Arabism, the 2022 World Cup emerged as a spectacle of music and noise, escapism, and existential remaking. Qatar, the small Arab nation preparing to host the region's first World Cup, faced an endless barrage of indictment and scorn before the music of soccer kicked off. Claims of “sportswashing” piled on, uttered from the very sources that peddled stereotypes and bigotry against Arab peoples.

Years before the tournament's first match, “Western” media outlets condemned Qatar as “unfit” to host the World Cup. The avalanche of negative coverage kept coming, climaxing with calls to strip the tournament from the Arab nation. While Western media outlets engaged in the very bigotry that plagued Arabs for decades, a new kind of Arabism unfolded at the World Cup. This time sprung by the sublime power of sport that charged this new kind of Arabism forward and charted a new course for transnational unity among the people. A transnational Arab identity that dribbled past ethnic tensions and passed across societal, sectarian, and spiritual splits. Race was being made, and dynamically remade, inside the soccer stadiums, streets, and souks in Qatar. Most powerfully, race was being reconstructed beyond the reach of Western powers and their laws.

The salience of sport in racial formation is dramatically overlooked and understudied by scholars. Particularly within legal scholarship, CRT has powerfully centered the role of the law in the formation of race and racial categories. Despite this scholarly neglect, history is saturated with passages of athletes redefining race and racial identity.

Within the realm of soccer, Pelé raced into the imagination of global fans with a brilliance that branded Blackness onto the game. The mercurial Argentinian icon Maradona coupled dissidence along with his sublime play, bridging politics and soccer in ways that persist today. American footballer Colin Kaepernick evolved from quarterback to civil rights icon for kneeling on the field to protest racist policing. Boxing pioneer Jack Johnson countered Jim Crow apartheid with an unapologetic, “unforgivable blackness.” Perhaps most iconic of all, Muhammad Ali's courageous dissidence stared American injustice squarely in the eye just as he did his formidable foes in the ring as he yelled, “what's my name fool?”

The 2022 World Cup witnessed an entire team, not a singular athlete, “uplifting the race.” Morocco became the standard bearer for a region divided across myriad lines. During a moment where influence is measured by fame and follower count, there are fewer more influential than athletes and perhaps no enterprise with the popular reach and resonance of sport. A survey of the massive following soccer stars mounted on leading social platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube confirms this. This influence also shapes discourses on race, racism, and formation of racial identity.

A central tenet of CRT is that “race and racial categories are products of political construction.” As historian Matthew Frye Jacobson aptly conceptualizes, “races are invented categories” affirmed by law and injected with political meaning, strategically deployed from the top to entrench prevailing interests. Despite its confining effects from the top, race can also be made “from the bottom.” By employing the narrative as a central race-making tool for “subaltern” groups, this Article illustrates how “oppressive groups have known instinctively that stories are an essential tool to their own survival and liberation.” Sport is the language of lay people, and soccer the lingua franca of the marginalized. Even more, soccer is a dialectic that resonates within the grassroots in ways that the law never can, evidenced by the gravitational pull of the sport's highest stage, the World Cup. This Article harmonizes the potent language of soccer with the reimagination of law by collecting original ethnographic and empirical data, providing firsthand coverage of the World Cup in Qatar, and providing an analysis of American racial ordering.

This Article centers the 2022 World Cup as a metanarrative that reconstructed Arabism against prevailing racial ascriptions rooted in colonial and American law. The tournament did so by: (1) demystifying imperial and War on Terror constructions of Arab identity; (2) reconstructing an indigenous modality of transnational Arabism in its stead; (3) curating a generative setting for a “mosaic racialization” that harmonized the diversity of a peoples who found common existential ties as Arabs; and (4) providing a template for rebuilding Arab identity within the shifting contours of American racial ordering.

This Article makes three major contributions to the legal literature, and its three parts follow in order of these scholarly contributions. Part I provides a history of modern Arabism from a CRT lens, examining its fluid arc from the postcolonial to the War on Terror eras.

Part II contributes a firsthand narrative of the 2022 World Cup. This narration of the historic tournament is told in line with how the State of Qatar, the native stage it curated, and the Moroccan team collectively reconstructed a transnational Arabism that resonated globally.

Part III theorizes mosaic racialization in relation to the nascent Arabism spawned at the World Cup. It then examines the correlation between the tournament's revitalization of Arabism and the law, probed through an empirical study of Arab Americans in the wake of the historic tournament.

[. . .]

Morocco's Atlas Lions emerged as a new breed of historians. They rose above bigotry and betting odds to win the hearts of Arabs around the world and, in doing so, rebuilt an Arabism disintegrated by colonial and contemporary law.

Like idols, old systems of divide, conquer, and colonial classification must be demolished to make place for new orders of self-definition. This occurs not in the fields of protest, war, and law, but also in the realm of sport. It occurs most powerfully on the highest stage of the world's most popular sport, soccer. This came to stirring life in Qatar, where the sublime play on the field blended and blurred with racial reclamation to make for revolutionary theatre.

For Arabs, divided across land and law, the 2022 World Cup marked this very moment. A moment when everything fell together, against postcolonial woes and War on Terror wounds that marred a people and marked them as terrorists. A moment when Arab identity was remade in the image of native symbols and roaring lions, who pieced the disparate parts of Arab identity into a mosaic. This ascent of new identity superseded the World Cup in Qatar, as Morocco roared toward the semifinals of the Olympic Games in Paris, again, illustrating that their arc continues to trend upward.

Race is a political construct. Even Whiteness, its most venerated creation, is an invention rooted in laws of caste and conquest. As James Baldwin noted, “No one was white before he/she came to America.” At the World Cup in Qatar, far from the identity crisis staged by the United States and before the human crisis that ravaged Gaza, the lies and laws ascribed to Arab identity fell apart and did not matter. Whiteness, finally, did not matter.

Khaled A. Beydoun. Law professor at the Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law and Director of the Center on Islamophobia and Law in Washington, DC.