The Qatar World Cup and a typology of Europe’s anti-Arab racism

The Arab world covers an area of 13 million square kilometers, stretching from Morocco in the west, to the United Arab Emirates in the east. While the region encompasses many groups that are neither ethnically Arab, nor fluent in Arabic, its predominant identity is understood to encompass one, if not both, of these features, and a sense of shared culture and history among its inhabitants. The Arab populations are generally classified into three groupings: North Africans, Levantine Arabs and Gulf Arabs.

While the Arab world is rich in diversity, so too are the modern manifestations of anti-Arab racism on the European continent. Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the first in an Arab or Middle Eastern state, provides a wealth of case studies that enable a detailed look at these manifestations and their drivers. In the analysis below, I attempt a typography of Europe’s different and intersecting racisms. 

North African racism

Morocco’s Atlas Lions emerged as some of the stars of the 2022 tournament, sweeping past Spain and Portugal to secure the number four spot in the tournament, and becoming the first Arab or African team to compete in the semi-finals. The team would win the hearts of millions of Arabs and Muslims, for their open embrace of Islam, the Palestinian cause and family values. Across each of their matches, Moroccan players carried out Islamic prayers on the football field and raised the Palestinian flag in support of Palestinian statehood. One of the players — Sofiane Boufal — delighted the crowds by pulling his hijab-clad mother onto the pitch, to dance in celebration after his team’s victory against Portugal. Another player, Achraf Hakimi, made headlines for racing to the stands to kiss his mother’s head, after scoring a penalty against Spain. For many Arabs, Muslims and Africans, the Moroccan team’s ability to humanize the very aspects of their identity that had so often been criticized by the West — from Islam to Palestine — made them the heroes of the tournament. 

For multiple European media outlets, the Moroccan team’s rise to victory provided an opportunity to question the humanity and ethics of the players themselves. On 17 December, a host in a Danish culture ministry-owned television transitioned from a story featuring images of Moroccan players hugging their mothers, to a news segment about animals. “In continuation of the talk about Morocco (players) and their families in Qatar, we also have an animal family gathering to keep warm,” the host noted, holding up a picture of a group of monkeys. Faced with a barrage of online criticism, the television station would later express regret over the incident. Two days earlier, a widely-read centrist Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant published a cartoon showing two young men riding a motorbike and waving a Moroccan flag, speeding off after snatching the World Cup trophy from FIFA President Gianni Infantino, suggesting that the team had reached the semi-finals through “cheating and underhand tactics.” The caricature also rested on depictions of Moroccans as thugs, and street criminals, effectively mocking the working-class and immigrant status of many Europeans of North African origin. 

Other media sources would be more direct in their evocation of anti-Muslim tropes. On 14 December, a television anchor from WELT, a major German news channel, directly compared the Moroccan national team with the Islamic State group, showing an image of players raising their index fingers and noting that “the greeting was one that the Islamic State has adopted.” Social media users would be quick to showcase images of multiple star players, including Brazil’s Ronaldo, making the same gesture. No apology would be issued this time.

Next came France’s hard-fought battle against Argentina during the thrilling final match, where Argentina claimed World Cup glory on penalties. With France’s team heavily represented by French players of African origin, three of its most notable players Aurélien Tchouaméni, Kingsley Coman, and Randal Kolo Muani would receive “sickening racial abuse” on social media the following day, including emojis of monkeys and bananas posted under their photos. The incident would draw comparisons with the abuse levied towards black English players Jadon Sancho, Marcus Rashford, and Bukayo Sako following their defeat in the Euro 2020 final. It also appeared to reinforce the infamous statement made by French-Algerian striker Karim Benzema that: “I am French when I score, but I am Arab when I don’t.”

 When it comes to Europe’s Arab and African citizens, expressions of racism are deeply intertwined with their immigrant and working-class status, as well as the racist tropes of Africans as uncivilized and barbaric. They are also rooted in long-standing depictions of Islam and Muslims as uniquely violent. This takes place against a post-colonial cultural landscape that continues to cast suspicion on black subjects, especially when centered as patriotic symbols. 

Demonization of the Palestinians, and their supporters 

 The decision by the Moroccan national team to raise the Palestinian national flag in each of their matches elicited praise from Arabs across the region, where support for Palestinian statehood, and their freedom from Israeli military occupation, remains a unifying cause. The move appeared to hold additional significance because of the decision by Morocco’s leadership to enact a peace agreement with Israel, two years earlier, without popular consultation. To many, the raising of the Palestinian flag in this context marked an act of resistance: signaling continued solidarity by the Arab people to the Palestinians, despite the actions of their governments. 

It would not be far into the tournament when the Moroccan national team would draw fire from German outlets, for raising the flag, with the left-leaning newspaper Die Tageszeitung accusing the team of anti-Semitism. While Germany carries the historic burden that accompanies its genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust, it has increasingly tainted pro-Palestine activists as anti-Semitic, for calling for their own rights to statehood. In 2019, the Bundestag voted to condemn the BDS movement, a non-violent movement established by Palestinian activists that calls for “economic pressure on Israel to end the occupation of Palestinian land, grant Arab citizens equal rights, and recognize the right of return of Palestinian refugees,” as anti-Semitic. The motion had been submitted by an array of left-wing parties, as well as Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party, reflecting a broad base of support among the German political class. A report issued by a group of ministers and members of the German upper house in December 2022 appears to act as a possible precursor for banning pro-Palestinian groups, in addition to maps of historic Palestine in educational curricula.

In response to the criticism of the Moroccan team, prominent Arab commentator Ahmed Shehab-Eldin noted: “In Germany, even left-wing newspapers are calling the Moroccan World Cup team anti-Semitic for raising a Palestinian flag. How misguidedly offensive. Germany’s got a lot of collective guilt to process.” When it comes to Palestinian activism, Europe’s demonization of the movement and its supporters is deeply intertwined with its own historic culpability in the Jewish genocide, and its continued role in offloading it historic guilt on the Palestinians and their supporters.  

Anti-Gulf racism

 Anti-Gulf racism occupies its own place within the landscape of anti-Arab racism. Like their North African and Palestinian counterparts, Gulf Arabs are tainted as uniquely prone to violence and extremism; but the prevalence of oil wealth in the region adds a further layer to these caricatures, positing Gulf Arabs as uniquely lazy, undeserving and uncultured, because of their wealth. These descriptions are little more than the product of fantastical orientalist imaginings, projected onto a sub-region that is hardly immune from poverty and suffers from highly inequitable distributions of wealth. Still, depictions of the entitled Gulf Arab are especially offensive to protestant morality, which elevates hard work, discipline, and frugality as expressions of heavenly virtue. Writing in the early 20th century, the German sociologist Max Weber would reflect on the protestant ethic as responsible for the growth of capitalism on the continent, and its very survival. Over 100 years later, its lingering vestiges are also likely influential in shaping the unique repulsion projected towards the modern Gulf Arab. 

Since FIFA’s decision to award Qatar the 2022 World Cup, the tiny Gulf state has faced unprecedented scrutiny, with major human rights organizations urging Doha to improve its labor standards, and accusing it of not doing enough to protect the rights of construction workers responsible for building the stadiums. Qatar would respond by enacting some labor reforms, earning it praise from the International Labour Organization, and criticism from organizations insisting that those reforms did not go far enough. Qatar would face further criticism for its criminalization of same-sex relationships, with French and Dutch cities enacting a boycott of the tournament. Both Britain’s BBC and ITV, Britain’s main public broadcasters, would also refuse to air the opening ceremony, despite the fact that they had found little objection with China’s hosting of the 2022 Winter Olympics, or Russia’s 2018 World Cup.

When it came to reporting on Doha, several Western media outlets would go above and beyond criticism of Qatar’s human rights record, to target its culture and its people. After spending a month in Doha, a sports correspondent with the Guardian — a left-leaning publication — would issue the following observation: “It is an interesting thing about Doha. The people you meet are routinely nice, friendly, and hospitable, but none of them are Qataris”, a statement evoking stereotypes of Gulf Arabs as cartoonish, possibly villainous Aladdin-type figures, locked away in mysterious out-of-reach palaces. The correspondent would helpfully tell his readers: “You can identify them by their cars, which really are extraordinary. Here is a Lincoln Navigator barrelling down a dust road. Here is a £250,000 Lamborghini Urus picking up the shopping.” Despite a month of reporting on football, the reporter appeared to have missed the prevalence of Qataris at every tournament, where they constituted many of the staff working at the tents dealing with customer support, as well as part of security teams scanning tickets, and ushering spectators to their seats. Not to miss out on any of the low-hanging fruit of stereotypes once deployed en-masse toward Dubai, the Guardian’s correspondent would also describe the presence of a Venice-themed shopping mall in Qatar as proof of its lack of culture (complete with a photo-op of the mall), adding: “Doha is built on a plateau of desert scrub. There are no features. So why not borrow some.” Here again, the reporter would do nothing to inform his audience about the multitude of museums, traditional souqs, or musical venues in the country. The equivalent might be a reporter parachuting into the United States, and describing the minute details of the Las Vegas Strip.  

It would be the concluding minutes of the tournament that drew the most furious and bigoted tirades, from sports commentators and journalists alike. At the final awards ceremony, and after distributing the medals to the winning team, Qatari  Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani presented Messi with a bisht, a formal black robe threaded with gold. Across many parts of the Arab world, the bisht is worn and gifted on special occasions, as a sign of honor and respect. What should have been properly understood as a moment of cross-cultural celebration — one of the purposes of the tournament according to FIFA — would become yet another opportunity for journalists to showcase their ignorance, and in the words of Ayman Mohyeldin, a Palestinian-Egyptian MSNBC host, “hatred towards local custom and tradition.” Reacting to the move, a correspondent from a British Sporting channel HITC Sport would describe the bisht as a “Victoria’s secret robe,” with another correspondent calling it a “weird mesh cloak,” and an ESPN correspondent describing it as “a cape that looks like he’s about to have a haircut.” Britain’s Telegraph would go further, calling the award of the bisht a “bizarre act that ruined the greatest moment in World Cup history.” Many would be quick to point out that the gift was not uncharacteristic for a World Cup ceremony, with Pele given a sombrero at the Mexican world cup, and athletes at the 2004 Olympics in Athens also gifted headdresses, which they wore in celebration. An Arab commentator, Muna AbuSulayman would remark: “Imagine if Messi was given the Kimono or a British order knighting robe, or an African hat. No one would have written a word.”

For all the racist tropes levied by European commentators throughout the tournament, Doha’s World Cup will be remembered by Arabs for a host of other reasons, including the rise of underdog teams like Morocco, and their unapologetic celebration of Arab culture on the world stage. The tournament will also be remembered for its humor: with a video of a Saudi fan demanding “where is Messi?” going viral after his team’s unlikely victory against Argentina, with the fan later re-emerging decked out in blue and white declaring “vamos Argentina” at the semi-finals. Several commentators would also point to the fact that the West’s moralizing simply failed to resonate in the Global South, noting the absence of any buy-in with the Western narrative around the World Cup. Writing in the Nation, Tony Karon and Daniel Levi observed that the tournament was a "sign that billions of people no longer think the United States and its entourage run the world.” 

For many Arabs, the intolerance and racism showcased by European commentators and sports journalists appear to have had an unlikely unifying effect: generating unprecedented expressions of inter-Arab solidarity, and unprecedented goodwill towards Qatar as a host state, which many view as having been subject to the same bad-faith attacks experienced by the rest of the region. At the state level, solidarity also appears to be a common theme, with Emirati, Saudi, and other Arab leaders, standing behind Qatar’s world cup and cheering on the host nation. For a region that continues to struggle through division, conflict, and rivalries, the unifying power of the Qatar World Cup among Arab leaders and citizens alike may stand as its most important legacy.