As football fever grips millions around the world, few Muslims stop to consider the deeper ideological and cultural baggage that accompanies the sport. Far from being a neutral pastime, football has played a significant role in promoting nationalism and reshaping Muslim identities over the past century, argues Maulana Sikander Iqbal.
“Football fever” is an appropriate expression for the fervent, almost religiously obsessive excitement that grips millions whenever a major international tournament approaches.
Yet the metaphor perhaps points to a deeper reality: a contagion that has afflicted the Ummah for more than a century.
Worse still, many imams, Islamic scholars, and Islamic institutes turn a blind eye to its symptoms or actively facilitate them through watch parties, tournaments, and promotional social media posts.
What may once have been a low-intensity sickness has become a chronic disease.
The curse of colonialism and nationalism
To understand why the Muslim enthralment with football is problematic, we must cast our gaze into the past. Only then can we appreciate that football is not merely intertwined with colonial ambitions but has also played a significant role in entrenching the noxious European doctrine of nationalism among Muslims and consolidating modernity as a global order.
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In his work Nations and Nationalism Since 1780, Eric Hobsbawm explains how modern sport became a vehicle through which attachment to nation-states was cultivated and reinforced. What appeared to be harmless competition increasingly served as a means of fostering national loyalty and channelling collective emotions into symbolic contests between rival states. Football became one of the most effective instruments for normalising nationalist sentiment among the masses.
Football was also exported throughout the Muslim world through European colonial rule in efforts to advance modernisation and state-building. Abdullah Al-Arian notes that football frequently served the interests of nationalist mobilisation and political consolidation throughout the colonial Middle East. In Mandate Palestine, organised football was utilised by colonial authorities and rival political actors alike to cultivate competing nationalist identities.
The sad reality is that, whichever perspective one adopts, whether European control of colonised Muslim populations or Muslim resistance through nationalist frameworks, the outcome was catastrophic. Both colonial suppression and opposition to it increasingly occurred through the language of nationalism and modernity, relegating the very force that possesses the power to change the world — Islam — to a distant and forgotten status.
Football’s function as a tool to consolidate modernity and the nationalism required to sustain the current global order continues into the present. Through global institutions, commercial interests, and international competition, attachment to national identities is continually reinforced and celebrated.
Yet perhaps the greatest tragedy lies not in Europe but within the Muslim world itself.
Despite periods of weakness and fragmentation, for over thirteen centuries Muslims were united through the overarching concept of a single Ummah, whose ultimate political expression was the Khilāfah. Following the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924, Muslim lands were increasingly butchered into territorial nation-states. Colonial agreements such as Sykes-Picot and subsequent British and French mandates accelerated the carving up of the Muslim world into political entities whose legitimacy rested upon territorial nationalism rather than the unity of Islam.
Nationalism succeeded where military occupation alone could not. It redefined identity itself.
The observations made by Shaykh Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī Nadwī الله رحمه on the nature of nationalism are worth revisiting:
“To every nationalist his own state is God’s most noble creation on earth and all else is rubbish. Nationalism brings forth the same fruit everywhere. It is impossible for a people to be imbued with nationalism and not have an aggressive nature. The leadership of such peoples invariably passes into the hands which know of no religious or moral control and have no object before them other than the enhancement of national prestige.”
In juxtaposing it with the Islamic structure of thought, he further wrote:
“Islam is against the philosophy of national separatism and selfishness as it has no regard for truth and stands bluntly for ‘my nation, right or wrong’. In the structure of the Qur’anic thought, considerations of descent or national adherence have no place. Islam rejects every alignment, friendship or loyalty which has its source in national or party spirit.”
The Qur’an dismantled every pre-Islamic basis of collective superiority, whether tribal, ethnic, racial, linguistic, or territorial. As the Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم said:
“He is not one of us who calls to ʿaṣabiyyah, fights for ʿaṣabiyyah, or dies upon ʿaṣabiyyah.”
Football culture frequently reawakens precisely these impulses. Tribal loyalties become club loyalties. Ethnic identities become national identities. Emotional attachment is transferred from the Ummah to flags, anthems, and sporting institutions. Islam gradually becomes displaced as the primary anchor of identity.
Corrosive football culture
At this point, many will object by claiming that football is merely a sport. Yet this response misses the point entirely. But the issue is not simply a ball being kicked across a pitch. The issue is twofold: how it operates ideologically and what football as a sport produces culturally.
Islam does not oppose beneficial recreation. The Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم encouraged physical strength and praised activities such as archery, horse riding, and other beneficial forms of exercise. Recreation becomes blameworthy only when it distracts from obligations, consumes excessive amounts of time, leads to sinful behaviour, cultivates harmful attachments, and compromises the primacy of Islam both intellectually and practically.
Football culture leads to these blameworthy traits.
Millions organise their lives around fixtures whilst neglecting gatherings of knowledge. They memorise league tables, statistics, transfers, and player histories whilst remaining ignorant of the lives of the Prophets, the Companions, and the scholars of Islam. They spend hours debating clubs, managers, and referees whilst dedicating little time to the Qur’an.
In other words, it subtly distorts the believer’s hierarchy of priorities.
One is compelled to ask: how many Muslims know the starting eleven of their favourite team better than they know the names of the ten promised Paradise? How many become emotionally devastated by the defeat of a football club whilst remaining unmoved by the suffering of the Ummah?
The Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم said: “From the excellence of a person’s Islam is leaving that which does not concern him.” The modern obsession with football stands in stark contrast to this Prophetic guidance.
Cultural imitation
Some may concede the dangers of nationalism and its attendant culture whilst arguing that football remains merely a sport. Yet it is difficult to cleanly separate football from its cultural baggage, especially when we consider another important Islamic concern: the gradual absorption of foreign values, identities, and worldviews through cultural imitation.
Ḥakīm al-Islām Mawlānā Qārī Muḥammad Ṭayyib الله رحمه observed:
“Every culture and civilisation consists of a series of customs and traditions tied together. Every custom is linked to another custom. So, adopting one custom means opening the door for other customs to creep in, which may ultimately result in embracing the whole culture.”
Football is not simply 90 minutes of physical exercise. It arrives as part of a wider cultural package consisting of celebrity worship, consumerism, gambling, alcohol sponsorship, tribal partisanship, nationalism, music, chants, slogans, and symbols.
What begins as support for a football club often develops into emotional attachment, cultural identification, and eventually imitation.
Qārī Muḥammad Ṭayyib الله رحمه further writes:
“If there is an alternative available in Islam, then imitation in those affairs is disliked (makrūh); because our self-respect requires us to avoid foreign objects for which we have substitutes at our disposal.”
This raises an important question: if Islam has already provided avenues for physical strength, brotherhood, recreation, competition, and collective identity, why should Muslims seek these things through institutions rooted in entirely different civilisational foundations?
The Messenger of Allah صلى الله عليه وسلم encouraged archery, horse riding, physical strength, and beneficial recreation. These activities were not merely forms of entertainment; they cultivated qualities beneficial to both the individual and the Ummah.
The issue, therefore, is not simply the game itself. It is the wider network of loyalties, symbols, habits, commercial interests, and identities that accompany it. What begins as entertainment can gradually become attachment; attachment can become admiration; and admiration can eventually become identification.
So given this discussion, we are compelled to ask: what should be said of Muslims who proudly wear the scarves, hats, and shirts of football clubs and national teams? What should be said of those who reduce football to mere physical exercise whilst ignoring its historical, ideological, and cultural baggage?
The believer who recognises the implications of these realities must understand that he is participating in something far greater than a game.
The fever must break. The cure lies not in transferring allegiance from one team to another, but in restoring loyalty to Allah, His Messenger صلى الله عليه وسلم, and the Ummah of Muḥammad صلى الله عليه وسلم.
For the Muslim possesses no banner superior to Islam, no identity nobler than servitude to Allah, no brotherhood greater than the Ummah, and no victory more worthy of celebration than the triumph of the religion of Allah.
