The Beautiful Game on a Muslim Pitch
How Football and Religion are Shaping Identity and Society
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.
Aaron W. Hughes is Dean’s Professor of the Humanities and the Philip S. Bernstein Professor of Religion at the University of Rochester. Hughes specialises in three fields: Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies and Theory and Method in the Study of Religion, and has written numerous books in all three. He is co-editor of the book series Advances in the Study of Islam at Edinburgh University Press and of the Journal of Religious Minorities Under Muslim Rule.
Leif Stenberg is Professor in Islamic Studies at the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) and a visiting professor at Karlstad University. He is the co-editor of What is Islamic Studies? European and North American Approaches to a Contested Field, also in the Exploring Muslim Contexts series at Edinburgh University Press.
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