SOURCE: THE NEW YORKER

BY: YASMINE AL-SAYYAD

1. In February, boisterous supporters of the English soccer team Liverpool F.C. unveiled a new chant in honor of their star winger, the Egyptian player Mohamed Salah. The fans, who had travelled to Portugal for a Champions League match against F.C. Porto, pumped their fists and hopped up and down, with pint glasses in hand, as they belted out a cheer to the tune of “Good Enough,” a 1996 hit by the English pop band Dodgy:

Mo Salah-la-la-la-la
Mo Salah-la-la-la-la
If he’s good enough for you
He’s good enough for me
If he scores another few
Then I’ll be Muslim, too.

In the thirtieth minute of the game, a shot came caroming off the goalpost. Salah settled the ball with his right foot, flicked it over Porto’s goalkeeper with his left, took a touch with his head, and then volleyed the ball into the net. It was a masterly goal, composed and brazen, Salah’s thirtieth of the season for Liverpool. After the game, the “I’ll be Muslim, too” video exploded across social media, garnering millions of views among triumphant Liverpool fans, but also legions of viewers who had no interest in soccer at all.

Salah has had a remarkable début season for Liverpool that will culminate on Saturday, when he leads his team against Real Madrid in the Champions League final. Real Madrid is seeking to lift the trophy for the third year in a row, but, for Liverpool, the game marks the end of an eleven-year absence from the final, a period during which the team has struggled at times to be considered even among the élite clubs in England. Much of Liverpool’s resurgence can be traced to the signing of Salah. This year, Salah broke the Premier League record for goals in a thirty-eight-game season, was recognized as the player of the year by the Professional Footballers’ Association, and won the Golden Boot for the most goals in the Premier League.

Salah, however, is much more than a global soccer star. He has become one the world’s most visible Muslims, and—even rarer—one with a distinctly Arab background. Most celebrities with Muslim backgrounds, from the supermodel Gigi Hadid to the former Algerian French soccer player Zinedine Zidane, now the manager of Real Madrid, have tended to blend in more easily with secular culture. Salah, by contrast, wears a beard, speaks English with a heavy accent, and is openly devout. After he scores, he prostrates himself on the field, and, less noticeably, raises his index finger up in shahadah, a gesture a little like crossing oneself. His social-media feeds are revealing of his faith: a picture posing in front of the Kaaba; captions with a shahadah emoji; a shot of the Grand Mosque, in Mecca. Salah’s four-year-old daughter is named after the holy city. (His Arabic nickname is Father of Mecca.) His wife, like a majority of Egyptian Muslim women, is veiled.

In Egypt, Ramadan lanterns have been minted in Salah’s image, and Saudi Arabia recently awarded him land in Mecca for being “a wonderful representative of Islam in Britain.” Mohamed Ali, an Egyptian member of Liverpool’s official supporters club in Sweden, told me that Arab Muslims’ embrace of the Liverpool player is driven by the fact that “he looks like us.” Kamal Mashjari, a Liverpool fan who frequents the same mosque as Salah, told me that, when Muslims see him, they see a young man “who goes to the mosque, who prostrates and prays on the pitch, who is widely in the public eye, and who is not hiding his religion.” Salah is not making a political statement, he added. “That’s just who he is and how he’s always been.”

Growing up in a village in the Nile Delta, Salah played soccer the way most Egyptian children of his generation did—by using a pair of old socks stuffed with worn-out shirts in the shape of a ball. “I remember the ten-year-old child who used to watch the Champions League at home,” he said during a recent interview on Egyptian television. He talked about what it must be like for Egyptians to watch him the way he used to watch other soccer stars, ones who did not share his background. “For them, you’re someone from their country. They see what you were able to accomplish,” he said. What makes him happiest now is for other Egyptians to realize that they can do it, too.

“When I first arrived in Egypt, I saw Salah play games with Arab Contractors, and we could see the talent, but he was young,” Bob Bradley, the Los Angeles F.C. coach, who has trained Salah, told me. “We had camps and friendly matches, and from the very first camp you could see that Salah was special. He worked hard—such speed, explosiveness, and most importantly, very smart, very humble. He wanted to learn.” But when Salah began his international career, with Basel, he hardly spoke English, and struggled to find his way around. “I didn’t know where I could pick up my food or anything,” he told the Liverpool team Web site. He left Basel for Chelsea but didn’t get much of a chance to prove himself on the field, and spent most of his time on loan abroad. His breakthrough came while playing on loan with A.S. Roma, where he finished the season as the club’s top goal-scorer. In June, 2017, he transferred to Liverpool.

Being religious yet apolitical is partly what has made Salah appealing to the predominantly white fan base of England’s Premier League. “I think part of Salah’s charm is that he’s not an outwardly political figure addressing Islamophobia in England,” Khaled Beydoun, a law scholar and the author of “American Islamophobia,” told me. “He is able to effectively erode negative views of Muslims and challenge Islamophobia” just by being himself. Earl Jenkins, a longtime Liverpool fan, said that Salah reminds him of the Jamaican-born John Barnes, the first black player for Liverpool. When Barnes joined the team, in 1987, “some people were threatening to rip up their season tickets,” Jenkins said. But Liverpool fans eventually embraced him. “I think the same is happening with Mo and Islam.”

Racist abuse has long been a problem in international soccer. Confederate flags are often spotted waving in the crowd during Italian games. In 2013, six Charlton Athletic fans were convicted of promoting racially motivated violence when they sang a song celebrating the death, in 1993, of Stephen Lawrence, a young black man who was murdered by a white supremacist. In March, in St. Petersburg, fans shouted monkey chants at the black French players Paul Pogba and Ousmane Dembélé. That same month, anonymous letters were sent to several homes in Britain, declaring April 3rd “Punish a Muslim Day.” No one reported any violence, but the letters were more evidence of the rising tide of Islamophobia in Britain. In London, a city that elected a Muslim mayor, hate crimes against Muslims increased by forty per cent between 2016 and 2017.

Whether a soccer player, even one as beloved as Salah, can have an effect on something as pernicious as racism is an open question. Joseph Massad, a historian and professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, is skeptical. “Salah is a winner, and everyone loves a winner,” Massad told me. “Just a few years ago, Zinedine Zidane, son of Algerian immigrants, received much adulation from Arabs, Muslims, and Africans, as well as his French compatriots, but his fame has not mitigated the ongoing Islamophobia of mainstream French culture, and I strongly doubt that Salah’s fame will in any way decrease the mainstream Islamophobia in British culture.”

Yet even I, as an Egyptian and a Muslim, and a non-soccer fan living an ocean away, have taken notice of Salah’s meteoric rise and thought about what he might do to change the perception of Arabs and Muslims around the world. I have often found myself—at airports, or on the subway—thinking, Do I look too Arab? Are my clothes too ethnic? Should I be trying to blend in? What stands out to me most about Salah, who is far more conspicuously Arab and Muslim than I am, is that he doesn’t seem concerned with trying to blend into anything. He is simply himself. That, more than anything else he has done on the field, is what I admire most.