In 1997 in Tunisia, Wihdat FC, the team of the Wihdat Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, participated in the Arab Champions League finals. They did not make it past the group stage. In fact, it was the third time in a row that Wihdat participated in the cup and exited at the group stage in last place. One match was especially embarrassing. Playing the Algerian club, Widad Athletic Tlemcen, Wihdat lost 7–0. Wihdat being crushed by seven goals did not go unnoticed in Jordan, especially among the supporters of Wihdat's eternal archrivals, FC Faysali. Faysali is the oldest club in Jordan and historically the most successful. It was the club of the royal military elite forces whose members had mainly been recruited from a powerful tribe in the Amman region, Atwan. Whereas Wihdat represents the Palestinian refugees, Faysali is a symbol of the historic, tribal–royal alliance in Jordan.Footnote 1
When Faysali went up against Wihdat in the Jordanian league in 1997, after the defeat in Tunisia, Faysali supporters brought a banner saying: “Wihdat will not win the cup before McDonalds offers mulūkhīya on the menu.” Mulūkhīya is a green herb from which a thick liquid dish is made, originally through the prolonged boiling of the herb. The dish is associated with poor peasants and with traditional Egyptian village food more than Palestinian food. In Jordan, however, as peasants, and not Bedouins, traditionally ate mulūkhīya, the dish became known as a Palestinian one, Palestinian refugees mainly having the peasant background with which mulūkhīya was linked.
At Wihdat's subsequent match, Wihdat supporters brought their own banner, a poster with a homemade McDonalds menu—including mulūkhīya. The mulūkhīya theme subsequently persisted and reached its climax when Wihdat became Jordanian champions at the end of the season. Receiving the trophy in a televised ceremony, the captain of Wihdat, Raʾfat ʿAli, himself a Palestinian refugee, brought forward a branch of the mulūkhīya plant, put the mulūkhīya in the trophy, and pretended to drink from it. Since then Wihdat supporters have adopted the chant, “mi ʾa, mi ʾa, Ra ʾfat ʿAli, ṣubb al-mulūkhīya” (hundred, hundred [or “go, go”], Raʾfat ʿAli, drank the mulūkhīya.”Footnote 2
Earlier approaches to football studies tended to analyze football as effects or dramatizations of something external to the matches.Footnote 3 Football was the beautiful game but did not affect the “real” world outside.Footnote 4 A related perspective, which we might label the “political barometer paradigm,” came to be especially dominant in analyses of Middle Eastern football. Football matches were where political and ideological trends in society at large were reflected through the chants of supporters, and where, occasionally, political taboos were broken. There are of course many good reasons why this became a dominant paradigm: the lack of alternative arenas for male youth gathering and political participation; the stadia constituting rare arenas for public free expression and speaking truth to power; political protests infrequently emanating from the football stadia to the streetsFootnote 5; and the football pitch being about the only place in the Arab world where talent and performance, not the omnipresent wāṣṭa and corruption, mattered.Footnote 6
What was not illuminated through the political barometer paradigm was the depth of genuine cultural processes among spectators during football matches, how symbols were invented and reinvented, interpreted and reinterpreted. Social communities exist through the symbolic construction of boundaries. Symbols do not express meanings; they give people the capacity to make meaning. As Anthony Cohen has outlined, such cultural processes are crucial for making and remaking social communities. The struggle over and manipulation of symbols is relational—the consciousness of community belonging is made through contrast with others.Footnote 7 It is in this context that the symbolic struggle over mulūkhīya and the symbolic binary oppositions of football in Jordan should be understood: as part of an ongoing process through which the social communities of Jordan were symbolically constructed.
Thus mulūkhīya has been constituted as part of a binary opposition in Jordan in which its counterpart is mansaf. Mansaf is a dish made from hardened, dry yogurt and meat from lamb or camel, served on large platters of flatbread. Mansaf was, and still is, the feast meal of Bedouins. Hence mansaf versus mulūkhīya symbolizes the old cleavage between the fallahin (peasants) and the nomadic tribal Bedouins, and consequently, most Palestinian refugees in Jordan being of peasant origin, the difference between East Bank Jordanians who originated in the country before 1948 and Palestinian Jordanians of refugee descent.
Mansaf–mulūkhīya has been constructed as a symbolic boundary even though Palestinians in Jordan eat mansaf from time to time, as do most Middle Easterners. From an East Bank Jordanian football supporter's perspective the symbolic construction is a statement of relative group worth—and Palestinians would acknowledge mansaf as above mulūkhīya in the regional food status hierarchy. “Because we eat mulūkhīya they say we eat like sheep,” said Yanan, a Palestinian refugee and Wihdat supporter who accompanied me to several matches during fieldwork in 2014.
“We are mansaf, you are mulūkhīya,” Faysali supporters now chant during matches, the chant serving as part of their symbolic weaponry against Wihdat.Footnote 8 Through football mansaf and mulūkhīya have become symbols of the two ethnic communities constituting the Jordanian nation. And through football mulūkhīya, symbolically constructed as a symbol of stigma for East Bank supporters, has been transformed into a symbol of pride for the Palestinians.
The mulūkhīya–mansaf dichotomy is but one of the binary oppositions heard during Wihdat matches. As I observed in Irbid in May 2014 watching Wihdat play the home team, al-Husayn, other symbols and meanings are likewise continuously referred to. “They say we used to eat grass,” says the Wihdat supporter Yanan, as al-Husayn supporters chant: “grass eaters, grass eaters.” al-Husayn has a tribal East Bank support base, a sort of lighter version of al-Faysali. The grass eaters chant alludes to the peasant background of the Palestinians but also to the historical poverty of the refugees as they arrived in Jordan devastated in 1948. During the match every chant, every symbolic meaning, contrasts with the chants of the supporters of the opposing team. And so Wihdat supporters yell back: “shepherds, shepherds,” shepherding being associated with Bedouin, East Bank Jordanians, less urban, modern, and educated than the Palestinian Jordanians regard themselves. “We gave you homes, we gave you money, you live because of us,” al-Husayn fans chant. “Allah gave us the right,” Wihdat supporters yell back, before they continue with one of their trademark chants, allāh, wiḥdat, al-quds al-ʿarabiyya (God, Wihdat, Arab Jerusalem), which connects the team to God and Palestine. Al-Husayn supporters reply in kind: allāh, ḥusayn, al-quds al-ḥashimiyya; the royal family of Jordan (and Transjordan) has since 1924 been the custodian of Christian and Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem—al-Quds is Jordanian, not Palestinian.
Four days later, on 23 May 2014, Wihdat plays at home against Dhat Ras. If they win they will win the Jordanian league. The stadium is packed with Wihdat supporters, there is a heavy police presence, and TV crews are broadcasting the match live. With Wihdat up 2–0 as the referee blows his whistle after ninety minutes of play, a Wihdat supporter storms the pitch. Chased by police, unable to catch him, he runs in front of ecstatic Wihdat fans. He raises his hand and waves to the roaring crowd holding a branch of green mulūkhīya leaves.
