In their love for sports, Egyptians are no different from people in other parts of the world. They follow closely their favorite local teams in national-cup competitions, the careers of those stars who have taken their games to professional clubs in Europe, and, of course, the fortunes of their national teams in international competition. Success, such as Egypt's victory in the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations can draw millions into the streets of Cairo and Alexandria in celebration. Losses can result in full-scale political investigations launched by President Hosni Mubarak.Footnote ³

That the fortunes of a modern nation might be associated with success or failure on the playing field is far from unique. For parts of the world formerly colonized by Europeans, international athletic competitions have long represented both an opportunity to challenge former colonizers and to assess modern nationalist projects. It is curious, however, that very little scholarly work has been done on the intersection of sport and society in the Middle Eastern context. Despite the enormous popularity of sports in Egypt and elsewhere, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have mostly ignored the seminal importance of football and other games in the region or the central role athletics plays in the formation of national identity in most Middle East and North African countries.

As the opening quotations suggest, football in particular has been at the center of Egypt's national consciousness from at least the 1920s. For most of the past eighty years, the game has been factored into discussions of race, civilization, and national identity. Egyptians have seen football as an arena not only to demonstrate their modernity and civilizational advancement vis-à-vis Europeans but also to differentiate themselves from the rest of the African continent, in particular from black African nations. Given its long history with both British imperialism and its own colonial escapades in Sudan, Egyptians were, in the words of Eve Troutt Powell, the “colonized colonizer,” and the invidious racial discourse that Troutt Powell identifies in both politics and popular culture permeated sports and sports writing as well.Footnote ⁴ From the 1920s, when football was seen as another way to differentiate Egyptians from darker-skinned Africans, to the 21st century, when Egypt's surprise victory in the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations was couched in unambiguously racial terms by some writers, sports have been one arena for the proliferation of a racial discourse that few, beyond Troutt Powell, have studied.

Of course, not all sports discussion in Egypt is moderated by race, nor is sport the only vehicle for understanding eighty years of discourse on civilization and race in the country. However, the study of sports, and football in particular, arguably the most popular form of cultural performance in Egypt and the rest of the Middle East, has much to add to our current understanding of the social, political, and cultural history of the region. Moreover, a sport-centered perspective on the region's history can be a valuable tool in the classroom. Courses in American universities about the region often tend to focus overwhelmingly on politics, war, and religion, often reinforcing notions of irreconcilable cultural differences. Considering in our classes the role of sports in Middle Eastern societies, however, represents one valuable way to communicate that the daily lives, practices, and concerns of people in the region are not always so unfamiliar. There are other ways to communicate cultural commonalities; sport is but one possibility. However, it is particularly fertile ground to empower students to engage with the history of the region in new and powerful ways. At the very least, it warrants a more central place in Middle East studies.