World Affairs
Female fans play political football
Published 22 May 2006
Observations on Iran
When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ordered an end last month to Iran's ban on women attending football matches, he said the change would bring "chastity" and "morality" to the stands. It certainly won't bring any carefree mingling, because stadiums will be strictly segregated, as are many other public spaces in Iran, such as buses, coffee shops and university campuses.
The conservative Shia mullahs, however, responded with a fatwa against the decision. No one is sure what happens next, but if recent history is any guide, it is the clergy who will find themselves exposed as out of touch with a population which, in football at least, will not bow to their authority.
The mullahs have never liked the beautiful game. The ban on women at matches dates from immediately after the Islamic revolution of 1979. And when, amid general jubilation, Iran qualified for the World Cup finals of 1998, the clergy sourly dismissed the football mania as an artificial construct of sporting imperialism.
People took little notice and the celebrations went ahead. Now, with Iran's team soon heading for Germany to play in this year's World Cup (they are drawn in a group with Mexico, Portugal and Angola), it may be that the public will be ready again to ignore the clergy.
The campaign is no foreign invention. It was nine years ago that thousands of women invaded the Freedom Stadium in Tehran to join the celebrations after the national team qualified for the 1998 tournament, and there have been many smaller protests in the succeeding years, even though they often meet fierce police repression. For this year's World Cup, there were plans to mobilise Iranians abroad to stage protests at matches in Germany on behalf of the female fans.
Unlike the mullahs, Iran's political classes know a vote-winner when they see one, even when it's supposedly just a game. (European politicians, too, often appropriate sporting passion to make up for the weariness of their own message. Tony Blair has done it, and German politicians are doing it for all they're worth at the moment.)
One thing this is definitely not about - though some of the cynical international reaction to Ahmadinejad's decision suggested as much - is nuclear diplomacy. The president is not making soccer into a political football just to divert world attention from his country's uranium enrichment activities. On that matter, we know, his strategy is to provoke the international community, not appease it.
No, this is about years of campaigning by Iranians themselves, a campaign that has made its mark even in the arts: Jafar Panahi won the Silver Bear in Berlin in February for his film Offside, about a group of women who dress up as men so that they can enter football stadiums.
So, provided the mullahs don't get their way, we should prepare to welcome a small if curious victory for the women of Iran. And the rebellion may not stop there.
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