Rare Sites and White Saviours? Gendered Orientalism,Radicalization,and the Construction of Muslim Women Soccer Players in TSN’s Radical Play

Abstract

In 2016, Canada sports broadcaster TSN aired a documentary, Radical Play, which focuses on the players of football team Diverse City FC, many of whom are Muslim and wear hijabs. As posited in the documentary, following the lifting of FIFA’s ban on the wearing of the hijab, soccer became the women’s vehicle for gaining more confidence and agency, which they use to become social media “crusaders” who fight the online radicalization of girls and women. Utilizing theories of gendered Orientalism, I analyze Radical Play by exploring how Muslim sportswomen are constructed in relation to sport, radicalization, and empowerment. I argue that Radical Play frames Diverse City FC’s story through Western rescue discourses and construct a modernizing process where Muslim girls are said to be empowered by the power of Western sport. The constructed transformation of the women into radicalization informants that keep their communities’ safe acts as a preferred outcome of colonial benevolence and acceptance towards “development subjects.” While the main narrative of Radical Play is leveraged by gendered forms of Orientalism, a critical reading shows how the players voices create cracks in this overarching story that help unsettle dominant understandings of Muslim sportswomen.

In April 2016, popular Canada sports broadcaster TSN (The Sports Network) produced a two-part documentary series, Radical Play, on its flagship show SportsCentre that highlighted the power of sport in positively developing Muslim youth. The second chapter of Radical Play focuses on the players of Diverse City FC, a soccer team in Belfast, Ireland, many of whom wear religious dress, including hijabs. The team is said to be started by social activist Ken McKew and the captain of the team – Fadhila – who had previously wanted to play football but faced obstacles due to the FIFA ban on head coverings and racism she has faced in Ireland. In 2014, however, FIFA lifted its ban on head coverings, which led to Fadhila and her teammates forming Diverse City FC. As posited in the documentary, soccer became the girls’ vehicle to gain more confidence, find their voices and, as Fadhila puts it, “speak up for my rights.” With this newfound confidence, Fadhila and her teammates have, according to the documentary, become social media “crusaders,” trying to fight the online radicalization of girls and women in their community to join the (ISIS) and become “jihadi brides.” Their story culminates with a victory at the Fair Play Football Cup, a tournament co-organized by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and Sport Against Racism Ireland (SARI) on World Refugee Day.

The story of Diverse City FC is underpinned by a broader post-9/11 context in which the idea of emancipating imperiled Muslim women from patriarchal, violent Muslim men remains omnipresent, which reinforces colonial ideologies justifying continued Western violence against Middle Eastern, South Asian, and North African communities. And although the documentary was filmed within Ireland, it was funded by a Canadian sport network and broadcasted to a Canadian audience that remains significantly shaped by Islamophobic sentiments that underpin such a context. The documentary first aired in April 2016 during the height of the so-called European migrant crisis, and amid newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge to settle 25,000 displaced people by the end of February 2016. Concerns raised about Muslim integration, border control, and national security precipitated by this decision and laced with racist sentiment illuminate Canada’s culpability in the rise of anti-Islamic and anti-immigrant discrimination and violence (Riano, 2017).

The second chapter of Radical Play must also be contextualized within institutionalized and everyday forms of racism and discrimination that Muslim women in Canada have endured in the post-9/11 period. Indeed, the Muslim woman’s body has been a site for ideological battles over national identity and citizenship in Western societies, including within the Canadian landscape (Zine, 2012a). The termination of faith-based arbitration in Ontario, media constructions of gender-based domestic violence involving Muslim families as “honour killings,” (Grewal, 2014) and Quebec’s ban on religious clothing in the name of secularism all present contemporary examples where the trope of the “oppressed Muslim woman” is juxtaposed against supposedly modern, “Canadian” values. At the same time, the continued racist violence and harassment towards Muslim women in the Canadian public (Baig, 2021; Horwood & Sherif, 2023) demonstrates that their mere presence is seen as an affront to such values.

My contextualized reading of Radical Play, thus, explores how Muslim sportswomen are constructed in relation to soccer, how gendered understandings of the Muslim world are shaped by radicalization discourses, and how the role of sport is framed within stories of development and empowerment for a Canadian audience. My main contention is that Diverse City FC’s story is framed within Orientalist assumptions about Muslim women and girls; assumptions positing that these women come to locate their agentic capabilities through soccer. This outcome is ostensibly made possible by FIFA’s lifting of its ban on the wearing of hijabs and by the intervention of Western, white men coaches such as McKew. These newly discovered capabilities are utilized by the players to counter the spread of extremist content on the internet in order to save their fellow women from being radicalized into becoming “jihadi brides.” I argue that the represented transformation of the Diverse City FC players from passive and voiceless into empowered and agentic fits neatly into sport-for-development (SDP) framings that credit such a transformation to Western interventions.

Nonetheless, sport is constructed as the driving force pushing Fadhila, Amina, and their teammates to become vocal advocates for themselves and for their fellow Muslim women peers who are constructed as passive and vulnerable. This “modernizing” process, sparked by the introduction of sport, articulates with Western messaging about the liberating of Muslim women from heavily patriarchal Muslim culture, while pointing to how development subjects are constructed within imperial myths of benevolence and charity. These discourses point to the ways in which sport is uncritically centered as the agent responsible for modernizing those from “undeveloped” nations, and in doing so masks the colonial legacies, unequal geopolitical relations, and lived realities of those from these regions (Darnell, 2014). And while the documentary does not explicitly refer to Diverse City FC as an SDP program per se, it nonetheless reproduces representations of the players in mostly universal ways, from collectively passive to empowered. In doing so, Radical Play leans on common SDP discourses characterizing girls and women in simplistic and decontextualized ways, most commonly as deficient subjects, but with the potential for empowerment (Forde & Frisby, 2015).

Finally, and as it relates to Muslim women, seemingly positive representations of the Diverse City FC players as empowered through football within Ireland reinforces discourses of sexual exceptionalism that overlook racial inequalities and situate the West as the site of gender equality and women’s freedom (Thorpe et al., 2018). This reinforcement of Orientalist discourse also shows how such “development” is made to occur on the West’s terms, not to counter racism and misogyny within Western culture, but rather to restoke fears about Islamic-inspired radicalization and its potentially dangerous implications for Western society. As such, the overarching set of narratives in Radical Play connect with previous critiques of SDP programs operating in Western nations that target populations considered “at-risk” of violence or deviance, including black (Hartmann, 2012), Indigenous (Gardam et al., 2017; Gartner-Manzon & Giles, 2016; Hayhurst & Giles, 2013), and Muslim (Ali & King, 2021) communities. While such analyses demonstrate how racialized assumptions about boys and men from these communities as inherently virulent are reproduced through such programs, my examination demonstrates how Muslim women are constructed as active agents through sport, but who are necessarily empowered to serve the interests of the West by surveiling their community.

Against these narratives, I go on to illustrate that the team’s beginnings, which fail to make the final cut of Radical Play, challenge the frames through which the documentary is shaped. Through this illustration, I make two insights. First, I show how the omission of contributions made by Fadhila’s brother Abdul Hajji and colleague Abdul Abdallah to the team’s formation and success within Radical Play helps maintain the discourse of Muslim men as unsupportive of women’s sport participation. Second, I illuminate how the voices of the featured Diverse City FC players, Fadhila and Amina, create “cracks” in the main story of Diverse City FC in Radical Play in ways that exemplify their agency outside of these Orientalist frames. In doing so, I demonstrate how such media texts may have a level of value, with certain limitations, beyond their intended message, if read through a critical lens.

Gendered Orientalism and the War on Terror

Edward Said (1978) defines Orientalism as “an enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage – and even produce – the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively” (p. 3). It is a discourse of power in which the Middle East is constructed, through texts, images, stereotypes, and representations as aberrant, premodern, fundamental, and virulent, while co-constituting the West as rational, developed, modern, and secular (Said, as cited in Salime, 2007). Importantly, these discourses of Orientalism are gendered (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Yegenoglu, 1998; Lewis, 1996) in ways that construct Muslim men as controlling, violent, and misogynistic, and Muslim women as passive, agentless, and in need of rescue. This also co-constitutes the west as a site of sexual exceptionalism, where women’s rights, gay liberation, and sexual inclusivity are seemingly championed, which is accomplished through an outsourcing of patriarchy to Middle Eastern communities (Grewal, 2014; Puar, 2008). These hegemonic framings create a double bind for Muslim women, who must negotiate sexism from within their community and challenge racism outside of it, while aligning with imperial frameworks that justify colonial violence through the necessity of empowering Muslim women, which in of itself becomes a civilizing endeavor (Khalid, 2011).

Muslim Women in Canada

These “dual oppressions” are illuminated in the experiences of Muslim women living in Canada, the site for the audience of Radical Play, who are constructed by nationalistic media discourses as living within a Muslim culture juxtaposed with the apparently multicultural and inclusive Canadian nation (Nagra, 2018). Despite these representations, violence against women, nonbinary, trans, and Two-Spirit people (across many racial and ethnic backgrounds) remains a pervasive problem in Canada (Canadian Women’s Foundation, 2022). Despite this reality, Baljit Nagra (2018) notes that violence against Muslim women is specifically located as a cultural, rather than societal, problem within Canadian media and political discourses. Sherene Razack (2018) argues that this hyper-anxiety around Muslim women must be understood through the Western desire to command them under the white masculine gaze. The desire to remove the veil or the veiled woman, from sight, is one manifestation of such anxieties.

These colonial, racial, and sexual politics are brought to bear in the everyday lives of Muslim girls and women navigating an often-hostile Canadian landscape. Nagra (2018) illustrates how these conceptions not only portray Muslim women as victims of an inherently patriarchal culture, but also as a racialized Others within Canadian society that are characterized as weak, passive, uneducated, unintelligent, and unable to speak English. Jasmin Zine (2012b) shows how Canadian Muslim girls found gender-segregated Islamic school provided a space for them to freely express their religious identities in contrast to public schools where such concepts manifest. Natasha Bakht’s (2020, 2022) research similarly demonstrates how niqab-wearing women are often targeted in Canadian public spaces for abuse and harassment, but who choose to wear the hijab despite the racist hostility they endure. While the women and girls of Diverse City FC are represented through a similar lens – as previously passive Muslim women who become empowered through sport – they also unsettle this narrative in ways that demonstrate their agency in a racially hostile Irish setting.

Representations of Muslim Sportswomen

Although there has been increased visibility of Muslim women athletes in the decades following 9/11, much of these representations are similarly informed by colonialist frameworks that claim Western forms of sport as the way out of oppressive Muslim culture (Samie, 2017). Previous analyses have analyzed the mediated representations of Muslim women at the Olympics (Samie & Tofoletti, 2018; Samie & Sehlikoglu, 2015; Amara, 2008, 2012), and on FIFA’s previous policy banning the wearing of the hijab (Hamzeh, 2015, 2017). Samie and Sehlikoglu (2015) found that media portrayals of Muslim women athletes at the 2012 Olympics reproduced Orientalized representations of these women as being “out-of-place” within the Olympic landscape. Samie and Tofoletti’s (2018) examination of media coverage on American-Muslim athletes Ibtihaj and Dalilah Muhammad at the 2016 Olympic Games found that “modernized” forms of Muslim femininity which align with Western values, patriotism, and the disavowal of “oppressive” Muslim traditions were reproduced in representations of Ibtihaj and Dalilah. More recently, critical sport studies literature has also included work on the experiences of Muslim sportswomen that have helped create an important counter-discourse to this problematic representation of Muslim women athletes as not belonging in the sport landscape (Ahmad & Thorpe, 2020; Ratna & Samie, 2017; Ratna, 2011, 2016).

Critical Radicalization Studies

My analysis is also shaped by the emergence of radicalization as the dominant explanation for “Islamic inspired” terrorism in Western nations. This explanation charges that Muslims, or Muslim-looking people of colour, are particularly vulnerable to extremist ideologies that may lead them down a path of violence. Critical radicalization scholars note that the emergence of radicalization has its roots within Orientalist genealogies that assumes there are insuperable differences between Muslim and Western civilizations (Aistrope, 2016; Elshimi, 2015; Eroukhamanoff, 2015; Heath-Kelly, 2012; Hornqvist & Flyghed, 2012; Jackson, 2015; Kundnani, 2012; Monaghan, 2014; Monaghan & Molnar, 2016). While violent radicalization tends to be associated with Muslim men and boys, girls and women are said to be vulnerable to extremist propaganda asking them to join terrorist entities in a domestic role as a jihadi bride (Windsor, 2020), or as a suicide bomber (Naaman, 2007). In my analysis of Radical Play, I explore the ways in which the Diverse City FC players, and the “vulnerable” girls they are trying to protect, are positioned ambivalently in relation to the threat of Islamic-inspired radicalization.

Methods: Critically Reading Radical Play

I analyze the representation of Diverse City FC soccer players in Radical Play to understand how sport was constructed in relation to the athletes and coaches, and to analyze this configuration within its larger cultural context. While the documentary was released during the migrant crisis, Part I of Radical Play focuses specifically on the story of Muslim migrant boxers in Hamburg, Germany (see Ali & King, 2021), while Part II’s focus is on the lifting of the hijab ban by FIFA and the Diverse City FC players who (at least according to the documentary) are not described as newcomers to Ireland. While I account for this broader context in my analysis of the documentary, my primary focus remained on the representation of the Diverse City FC players.

I did so by employing a critical discourse analysis that interrogated Radical Play as a rhetorical text that is meant to construct certain stories and realities to an audience (Heinecken, 2018, 2021). This is particularly important considering that documentaries hold a privileged (and oftentimes assumed) position to truth compared with other popular media sources (Fuhs, 2017). Combined with story-led narrative becoming a popular form of documentary filmmaking in recent years, which has increased its attractiveness (McDonald, 2007), this privileged position has also meant creating more palatable viewing experiences for audiences. While McDonald (2007) previously noted that sport documentaries tend to reproduce, rather than challenge, systemic inequalities over a decade ago, recent critical analyses of this genre have reached similar conclusions (Ali, 2022; Ali & King, 2021; Antunovic & Linden, 2020; Colás, 2017; Dickerson, 2018; Fuhs, 2017; Heinecken, 2018, 2021; Howley, 2017; Lavelle, 2015; Sheppard, 2017).

I began my analysis by first conducting several viewings of Radical Play to identify its main characters, the major focus of the film, and initial overarching themes and story narrative. Through these viewings, my first objective was to gain a strong familiarity with these elements, while noting the overall message it was sending to its audience. I noted the filmmaker’s choices throughout the documentary, including decisions made concerning the production, dialogue, settings, and cinematography (Ali, 2022; Ali & King, 2021; Heinecken, 2018, 2021). Of particular importance to me were the ways in which Radical Play’s main characters – including two Diverse City FC players Amina and Fadhila, and social activist and team co-founder McKew – were positioned in relation to the team, each other, and soccer, and how they communicated ideas about religion, race, and sport. Through this process, I identified three main discursive themes: first, the construction of soccer as the empowerment agent for the development of Diverse City FC players; second, the occlusion of Muslim men within this constructed development narrative; and third, the representation of the empowered Muslim girls as deradicalization agents who are motivated to keep their communities safe from the threat of extremist ideology.

After identifying these themes, I put them into conversation with each other by conducting a “close reading” (Colás, 2017) of the documentary to understand how Radical Play guides its viewers on a particular journey of Diverse City FC’s story. To do so, I first read each discourse against one another and noted the regularities and consistencies across them, paying attention to what was said regarding sport, Muslim women, and empowerment, and what was not said regarding these topics. I also situated the themes within the affective elements of the film, including the emotions and feelings expressed by the characters in certain moments, and the ways in which the discourse was positioned in relation to the music, sound, and imagery of Radical Play. I employed this analysis to demonstrate the ways in which such aesthetics can spark affective responses in viewers that might reinforce the dominant narratives of the film. For example, I noted how scenes depicting the cheerfulness of the players was paired with uplifting music and voice-overs promoting the importance of soccer in their lives created a simplified, but effective, construction of sport as a powerful development agent.

Second, I also searched for inconsistencies, silences, and contradictions as a strategy to interrogate the dominant narrative of Radical Play. I did so, by seeking out other sources on Diverse City FC, including its own WordPress website (Diverse City FC, n.d.), which was run by the team, and the website of SARI, an organization that helped form Diverse City FC. In doing so, I was able to uncover important silences in the documentary including, for example, contributions of Muslim men to Diverse City FC, which allowed Radical Play to produce a specific story of Muslim women’s empowerment through sport. Through multiple viewings and analysis of interviews the filmmakers conducted with the players, I also identified several “cracks” in Radical Play’s dominant narrative to illuminate the voices and agency of the Diverse City FC girls and women. Finally, I connected the overarching themes with the literature on gendered Orientalism, the experiences of Muslim women in Western nations, Muslim sportswomen, and radicalization to contextualize and interpret Radical Play within the post-9/11 cultural landscape.

A Rare Site in Europe? Muslim Women’s Empowerment through Soccer

The documentary begins with a monologue by Fadhila, who states that football “made me speak up for myself. If I’m heading towards a dangerous path, I’ll be able to say ‘no, this is wrong for me.’” Fadhila then performs a spoken-word poem to the camera that describes her resiliency against life challenges. This is voiced-over a collage of images of Muslim women in hijabs at various social movements, though they are not specifically named. After the title sequence, the next scene opens with what is described as a “rare site in Europe” by the narrator, TSN journalist Rick Westhead: Muslim girls playing soccer with “their legs covered, their heads wrapped in hijabs.” Fadhila is noted as starting the team alongside Ken McKew, who is white and introduced as a social activist. When asked why she was not allowed to join teams previously, Fadhila stated that it was because she wore the hijab, stating that “Managers didn’t allow (sic) because they just found it so strange and odd. Some of them were just racist, you know.”

Westhead then gives a brief overview of FIFA’s hijab ban and “race issues” in Ireland that left Muslim women “on the sidelines.” McKew adds that some of the players were previously physically assaulted and bullied by classmates, and that “teachers didn’t help” the players in these situations. Amina Moustafa, Fadhila’s teammate, explained what happened when she told her principal that she planned on wearing the hijab to school: “she said ‘absolutely not’… she was completely against it. She was saying I couldn’t attend her school if I wore a scarf.” Amina does not appear wearing a scarf in her scenes during Radical Play and given the explanation of her encounter with the principal, it might be the case that the audience is left to assume that she had intentions to wear one but was restricted from doing so. At the same time, Amina may also be choosing not to wear the hijab, but this question is left unaddressed throughout the documentary.

The introduction to the documentary provides two interrelated points of analysis. This begins with Fadhila’s opening words, which signal a possibility of future threat, but one that can be thwarted through the power of football that gave her the confidence to avoid this “dangerous path.” This begins with a collage of images showing Muslim women protesting Islamophobia and the war on terror, which is voiced over with Fadhila’s poem that includes phrases such as “I can’t take it anymore,” “pain, torture, it was rough,” and “you put me down on my life, now I never want you near.” Such images, which communicate a lack of acceptance of Muslim women within the West, combined with Fadhila’s words that communicate grievances with how she has been treated position her as being in danger of becoming the “radicalized girl.” This figure is ostensibly constructed through Western anxieties regarding its perceived failure to empower and protect Muslim girls and women from extremist propaganda, which catalyzes their radicalization (Letort & Bourenane, 2022). This figure is signified paradoxically as passive and agentless, but also as a reproductive threat through her perceived ability to create more “terrorist Muslim men” (Thobani, 2007) through becoming an ISIS bride and, to a lesser degree, as a possible figure of threat for pathological violence and radicalization herself (Gidaris, 2018). As such, the assertiveness with which Fadhila speaks in this scene, ostensibly brought on by her engagement in football, presents itself in ambivalent terms, as both empowering and possibly threatening, to a Western audience.

Second, Radical Play highlights what it terms a “rare site in Europe”: veiled Muslim girls playing soccer, which immediately communicates the message that Muslim women are considered out-of-place within sporting arenas Samie & Sehlikoglu (2015). Here, the hijab is represented as the main barrier for Muslim women’s participation in soccer, rather than the racism the players faced from coaches and teachers, as well as the discrimination inherent to FIFA’s banning of religious head coverings in the first place. And while both Fadhila and Amina point to anti-Islamic racism as an important factor preventing them from full participation in Irish society, the documentary fails to explore this direction in a meaningful way, acknowledging these marginally as “race issues.” Instead, Radical Play constructs the hijab ban as the focal point of their struggle, with Westhead stating that “Muslim women who wore the hijab” were previously left on the sidelines until FIFA changed their policies on veiling. The supposed confidence instilled in the girls once they were able to wear the hijab while playing soccer must be met with caution, considering that many Muslim women athletes who have worn the hijab have been subjected to racist insults and abuse on the playing field (Samie, 2017). Moreover, the positioning of the hijab as the problem before the head-covering ban was lifted also frames participation in soccer as a personal choice between religion and sport for these women, rather than exploring the racism that conditioned such a ban in the first place.

The documentary goes on to describe that after FIFA’s lifted of its policy banning head coverings in 2014, “Diverse City took flight.” McKew adds that “before this (FIFA’s lifting of the ban) they (the players) would be shy to wear the hijab in public” but that after they played soccer games with the hijab on, that they became “proud” of wearing it, and that this became very “natural” to them. Fadhila states that “it was very welcoming and made me build my confidence in… how to speak up and say no and… just fighting for my rights you know?” These voice-overs are shown in concert with scenes of the Diverse City FC players cheering together, and with a photograph of Muslim women in soccer uniforms (it is unclear whether this is Diverse City FC) in hijabs smiling and waving to the camera, with a FIFA flag in the foreground. This is complemented with background music that one might consider hopeful and uplifting, which stands in contrast to the introduction of the documentary that presents Fadhila in a more ambivalent fashion, as empowered but beleaguered, as assertive but suspicious.

Here, the relationship between FIFA, the hijab, and the Diverse City FC players, as constructed in Radical Play, demonstrates the ways in which Western benevolence is forwarded as the gateway through which Muslim sportswomen can fully realize their potential. While in the first installment of Radical Play, this benevolence was constructed through the responsibility of boxing trainers to either modernize or control “at-risk” Muslim migrant boys (Ali & King, 2021), Diverse City FC are portrayed as beneficiaries of Western multiculturalism and acceptance in its second chapter. FIFA is concomitantly represented as the symbol of the West’s embracing of multiculturalism and integration through its ban-lifting, which ostensibly sparked a sense of confidence and naturalness to wearing the hijab for the Diverse City FC players, which ostensibly helps facilitate their development. Such empowerment is realized, according to the documentary, via the players’ access to soccer, which is made possible by FIFA and Ken McKew. Importantly, this permittable and palatable form of empowerment reproduces FIFA’s benevolence towards, and paternalism over Muslim sportswomen through discourses of protection; from Muslim patriarchy, and previously from the constructed dangers of wearing a hijab while playing football (Prouse, 2015). This discourse of development through sport, particularly that of non-Western women, has also been shown to strengthen colonial logics by homogenizing such women as agentless, passive, and in need of rescue in the first place (Hayhurst et al., 2015), and by creating a false dichotomy where religious practice, particularly within Muslim society, is antithetical to women’s empowerment (Samie, 2017).

White Saviours? The Erasure of Muslim Men in Radical Play

As forwarded in Radical Play, the conduit through which this confidence is achieved is sport, as ostensibly administered and overseen by McKew, one of the co-founders of SARI who is white. Omitted from the documentary, however, is the fact that Diverse City FC was started by Abdul Hajji, who is Fadhila’s older brother, and Abdul Abdallah as part of a program called “Hijabs and Hattricks” to help Muslim women to become active, integrated citizens in Ireland (Streetfoootballworld, 2017). According to the Diverse City FC WordPress website, “the hijabs and hat tricks project was organized by Abdul Abdallah and Abdul Hajji, two enthusiastic and charismatic sports driven individuals. Once they saw this new opportunity, they dedicated the project to creating a Muslim women’s football team in Dublin” (2014). Haiji states that “I wanted to make a change for my sister” after explaining that he noticed she was only able to play pickup games previously, and that there were no school teams for girls (Streetfoootballworld, 2017). The eventual plan was for the boys to step aside to let the women run the team on their own (Diverse City, 2015).

Except for a few background shots of the two Muslim boys on the pitch coaching the team, however, they are not acknowledged in the Radical Play narrative. Instead, McKew is assumed to be responsible for starting the team. It is not my intent to downplay or question McKew’s contribution to SARI or the team, nor is it to minimize the experiences and contributions of the Diverse City FC team members. It is, rather, to illustrate how Radical Play showcases McKew, a white man and western organizations such as FIFA and the UN Refugee Agency – who organizes the Fair Play Cup on Refugee Day each year – as primarily responsible for the development of Muslim women. Indeed, to have the Hijabs and Hat Tricks Project be organized and successfully run by two Muslim men works against this Orientalist framing of Diverse City FC’s story; a framing which reinforces the West as liberal, secular, and modern. Moreover, the uninterrogated, dominant position of whiteness is implicitly secured through representing McKew, FIFA, and the UN as benevolent stewards for the SDP-based integration of “ethnic” others (Darnell, 2012). Conversely, by erasing the contributions of Haiji and Abdallah to the formation of Diverse City FC, Radical Play also maintains gendered forms of Orientalism that construct Muslim men as sexist and barbaric, which strengthens the rationale for disciplining, detaining, and surveilling them (Thobani, 2014).

By illuminating this counter-narrative about the story of Diverse City FC, however, it becomes possible to challenge prevailing understandings about relationships between Muslim men and women; specifically, that the latter requires rescuing from the former. Lila Abu-Lughod (2002) brings a pertinent question to this conversation when she asks where there would be a similar mobilization of efforts to “save” Muslim women if it were anyone else other than a Muslim man who was responsible for her oppression. While previous studies have shown how Muslim sportsmen are represented as either dangerous and violent (Ali & King, 2021; Malcolm et al., 2010) or as becoming resilient to these predispositions through the West’s apparent championing of multiculturalism and tolerance (Burdsey, 2007, 2016), the erasure of Haiji and Abdallah’s contributions demonstrates how gendered forms of Orientalism operate in the prevailing narrative of Radical Play: the empowerment of Muslim women through sport.

Social Media Crusaders? Diverse City FC as Radicalization Informants

In the second half of Radical Play, the Diverse City FC players are framed as utilizing their newfound sense of agency to fight back against the ostensibly growing threat of radicalization within their communities, particularly that which targets Muslim girls and women. The documentary shows a collage of news stories describing the threat of ISIS propoganda targeting girls and women to move to Syria and become “jihadi brides,” before Daniel Koehler, Director of the German Institute of Radicalization, states that around 20–30% of foreign fighters joining ISIS are women, and the number is rising. During this segment, Shaykhumar Al-Qadri, the founder of the Islamic Cultural Centre for Ireland, is interviewed regarding how radicalization might take place within Muslim communities. He states that “When people get infected with Islamophobia, they usually go to the path of isolation, they tend to develop the notion of us and them which of course does not help integration at all. (It) creates more violence; creates more fear amongst societies.”

The Diverse City FC team members are represented as important advocates for the Muslim community in the fight against the radicalization of girls and women vulnerable to such “infections”. Westhead, for example, states that “instilled with a new sense of confidence, Fadhila and her teammates have become social media crusaders, using their newfound voices to fight radicalization, especially as it pertains to women.” Fadhila then states that “On Facebook we’ll be looking for racist comments, propaganda, images, and also people recruiting other people to go into Iraq, Syria, and joining ISIS. So, our job is to try and prevent that.” To refer to the players as social media “crusaders” is telling; the taking back the “Holy Land” from Muslim rule in the medieval period is aligned with the “freed” Muslim women challenging ISIS from British soil through the patrolling of social media for the identification and removal of ISIS propaganda in efforts to stymie its influence on other Muslim girls.

These representations of Diverse City FC as radicalization informants also coalesce within broader security logics that often encourage the downloading of surveillance onto Muslim civil society (Heath-Kelly, 2012). In performing these ostensibly self-imposed duties to their community, the members of Diverse City FC are represented as nodes of civil surveillance who monitor their neighbourhoods for threats of radicalization. At the same time, the Diverse City FC players are also constructed vis-à-vis Orientalist frames as “good Muslims” – moderate, integrated, and secular (Mamdani, 2004) – who protect their fellow girls, women, and communities, from ISIS recruiters, or “bad Muslims” – fundamental, premodern, and misogynistic.

Their ostensible motivation for attempting to halt the radicalization of their peers is interesting, however, considering that none of the players interviewed state that they have witnessed one of their friends or teammates become, or potentially vulnerable to becoming, a jihadi bride. Also intriguing is that the girls are constructed as being concerned with Muslim radicalization, despite evidence that Fadhila and Amina were subject to racism and prejudice in Ireland from sport and school officials. This demonstrates how development subjects come into being through Western logics that frame such development through an adherence to its values and an ignorance of its colonial histories and racist present. Those who successfully integrate, and gain freedom are then tasked with helping others who are “susceptible” to radicalization, and thus considered a threat to such values.

This supposed development of Diverse City FC into a team of anti-radicalization activists reproduces two common Orientalist tropes: the rescue narrative paramount to the civilizing project centered on Muslim women; and the construction of secularized, empowered Muslim girls as role models for other girls in their communities within the West. First, and as part of this project, the liberation of previously passive Muslim women becomes the measuring stick by which the West measures its success in developing the Muslim within liberal democracies. In the case of Diverse City FC and Ireland, this success is defined by constructing the journey of Fadhila, Amina, and their teammates from passivity to independence, a journey secured by Western sport institutions (FIFA), and white, male coaches like McKew. Second, the construction of Fadhila and Amina as role models is a common framing for women athletes, but it also reproduces an assimilationist framework to which minority racial groups are expected to aspire (Burdsey, 2007). In Daniel Burdsey’s (2007) analysis of media portrayals of Amir Khan, for example, he found that prevailing discourses simultaneously construct the British boxer positively while reproducing those from his community (working-class British Muslims) as pathological. In Radical Play, similar work is done by presenting Fadhila and Amina as empowered Muslim women, juxtaposed with the passive, vulnerable girls they are trying to protect within their community. Moreover, the ways in which Radical Play’s representation of Diverse City FC players, although positive, overlooks or minimizes issues of racism further entrench unequal power relations (Thorpe et al., 2018) while constructing other members of the Muslim community as vulnerable, suspicious, and dangerous.

Such reproductions of cultural difference between diasporic Muslim communities and Western values, one which is often deemed incommensurable, aligns with what Mohammed Elshimi (2015) describes as the logic of security and community cohesion that come together through discourses of radicalization. Elshimi (2015), for example, critiqued Britain’s Channel project which aimed to target young people considered vulnerable to radicalization and instead racially profiled Muslim youth. He argues that, as part of its strategy, the Channel project delegated responsibilities for spotting and intervening on radicalization to Muslim civil society. The construction of the Muslim community as responsible for self-surveillance and identification of those vulnerable radicalization is salient to this form of disciplinary power. These include online communities, where much of the material that could spark a move towards radicalization is posited to be found. Through the construction of the Diverse City FC players as online watchdogs, the documentary reinforces the notion that radicalization occurs through a cultural-psychological predisposition (Kundnani, 2012) and that Muslim neighbourhoods are especially susceptible to radicalization and extremism (Hornqvist & Flyghed, 2012). This makes it imperative for progressive, “good” Muslims, like the Diverse City FC players, to become Western “informants” by acting as neighbourhood watchdogs for signs of radicalization amongst their family members, friends, and peers. In doing so, Diverse City FC is represented as good Muslims who are attempting to bring others along the path to modernity and out of a backwards, patriarchal culture.

Observed here is a becoming of development subjects who, sparked by the goodness of sport, can locate hidden potential once repressed within them and use it to help liberate other Muslim girls from the tyranny of Muslim extremism. As Simon Darnell (2014) notes, sport is imperative to this colonial project in that it is constructed as one of the mediums by which previously undeveloped subjects are modernized. Importantly, the reality of the developed(ing) subject is not followed by questioning of the role imperialism has played in constructing them as such, but rather by efforts to bring others along with them on the path to modernization. In the case of Diverse City FC, sport is constructed as empowering the players towards becoming palatable, neutral figures of radicalization informants, rather than as towards becoming more critical of racism they have faced within Irish society.

Cracks in the Narrative? Highlighting the Voices of Fadhila and Amina

The main story of Radical Play circulates the idea that sport, and in this case soccer, can represent the necessary medium through which Muslim girls can develop agency and build confidence, which they use to protect their communities from the omnipresent threat of radicalization. As important to the construction of Diverse City FC players as anti-radicalization advocates are the ways in which these representations occlude deeper exploration of the anti-Muslim racism they faced and responded to within broader Irish society. This occlusion is made explicit when considering that Fadhila, Amina, and even McKew provide concrete examples of racism that the girls faced from coaches and school officials, as discussed in the introduction to the analysis, whilst not providing empirical accounts of radicalized girls or women that went on to become “jihadi brides” in Syria. And yet, the story flows into how Diverse City FC have used their platform to speak out against ISIS and radicalization, rather than using sport to fight back against racism they faced, because the latter fails to fit linearly into the main narrative of this documentary. Fadhila and Amina, however, explain how they resist racism from their peers as well as coaches and educators, which demonstrates their persistence in pursuing soccer, even when faced with discrimination and harassment.

Moreover, despite Radical Play’s positioning of soccer, and FIFA, as the agents through which confidence and autonomy is secured for the players of Diverse City FC, Fadhila and Amina both unsettle this narrative throughout the documentary. In two scenes, for example, Fadhila expresses her story through poetry that acts as a narrative resistance to problematic and racist assumptions about Islam. In her first poem, as previously discussed, Fadhila focuses on her individual perseverance against anti-Islamic racism. In a second poem, Fadhila resists Orientalist depictions of Islam, stating that it is “a religion of peace” before going on to say “I’m gonna do it every day in the name of Allah, and I hope to see Jannah, In sha’Allah ameen.” Fadhila’s embracing of her Muslimness and sport in these moments helps resist colonial logics positing that Muslim women must choose between sport and religion, while illustrating how Islam can serve as a basis for women’s empowerment. This is supported by an earlier interview with Fadhila, where she states that “before I joined a team, I did have the confidence, but not the urge to speak up… for what’s right, and now I do” (my emphasis). As such, Fadhila’s poems work against the dominant colonizing discourses of Radical Play, and helps, as Samie argues, “recover subjugated perspectives so as to replace colonialist thinking with alternative knowledges” about Muslim sportswomen (p. 53, 2017).

Finally, to close the documentary, Diverse City FC is shown winning the Fair Play Football Cup, a tournament organized by the UN Refugee Agency to mark World Refugee Day which features domestic and international teams from refugee and community groups. Diverse City’s win earned them the trophy at the inaugural women’s tournament in 2015. This victory is, unfortunately, framed through the good Muslim-bad Muslim binary, as McKew states that Diverse City FC’s win was captured on the national news following a story about “ISIS and beheadings.” At the same time, their athletic success on the pitch in this moment does challenge, in part, dominant representations of Muslim women as not belonging in sport (Samie, 2017; Samie & Sehlikoglu, 2015).

Conclusion

This analysis of the Radical Play demonstrates how its filmmakers rely on Orientalist tropes to produce dominant understandings of Muslim sportswomen and radicalization that are both gendered and racialized. Such discourses mask the role sport plays in the colonial process by offering it as a “neutral” medium through which the undeveloped can modernize. In doing so, the main narrative of Radical Play further entrenches hegemonic ideas about Muslim culture that produce it as suspicious, universally patriarchal, and incommensurable with Western society, which is concomitantly reproduced as a site for women’s liberation and gender equality. This occurs through SDP discourses that construct Western, white (and in the case of Radical Play, male) subjects as benevolent, and Muslim women soccer players as ethnic, developing “others,” and through radicalization discourses that differentiate good Muslims (Diverse City FC as radicalization informants) from bad Muslims (ISIS and possibly vulnerable Muslim girls). These discourses combine to shape a comfortable narrative within Radical Play that is palatable for a Canadian audience; one which amalgamates a familiar “power of sport” story that celebrates individual players as successful outcomes of imperial charity (Darnell, 2014) with underlying, sustained post 9/11 anxieties about the suspiciousness of Muslims.

At the same time, and as I show, by highlighting subjugated discourses that unsettle stories like this, it becomes possible to disrupt the representational regimes that construct the “sporting Muslim woman” through homogenous, essentialist, and colonizing discourses (Samie & Sehlikoglu, 2015, p. 376), even as they remain pervasive within the Western media landscape. These counter-narratives remain paramount for two reasons; first, they provide important context in a time where media outlets and the disinformation industry are one of the major agents espousing anti-Islamic racist rhetoric, and which help compose a transnational Canadian Islamophobia “ecosystem” (Zine, 2022). Second, and in a sporting landscape where the trailblazing efforts of some Muslim women are (finally) being recognized within Western media, including that of Moroccan footballer Nouhaila Benzina who became the first hijab-wearing player at a FIFA Women’s World Cup in July 2023, such narratives will be needed to subvert and resist Islamophobic, Orientalist discourses that trivialize or minimize such accomplishments. It is my hope that this analysis has made some inroads in responding to Samie and Sehlikoglu’s (2015) important call for more lucid insights from sport sociologists regarding how Orientalist representations of Muslim sportswomen operate. In a time where the sport for deradicalization industry continues to grow alongside Islamophobia and anti-immigrant xenophobia, these insights remain of paramount importance.