Edward Said seminal work, Orientalism, is as relevant today in discussing Western discourses and framed debates around Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup. Said’s writing on the binary, East and West, the idea of us and them is rooted in making distinctions between “our” land and the land of the barbarians. The World Cup coverage deployed the “barbarians” trope in discussing Qatar, the Arab and Muslim World, where every difference was magnified and essentialized so as to produce the most negative reaction and disdain.

Said maintained that the “universal practice of designating in one’s mind a familiar space which is “ours” and an unfamiliar space beyond “ours” which is “theirs” is a way of making geographical distinctions that can be entirely arbitrary.” Said goes further to say, “I use the word “arbitrary” here because imaginative geography of the “our land — barbarian land” variety does not require that the barbarians acknowledge the distinction. It is enough for “us” to set up these boundaries in our own minds; “they” become “they” accordingly, and both their territory and their mentality are designated as different from “ours.” … The geographic boundaries accompany the social, ethnic, and cultural ones in expected ways. Yet often the sense in which someone feels himself to be not foreign is based on a very un-rigorous idea of what is “out there,” beyond one’s own territory. All kinds of suppositions, associations, and fictions appear to crowd the un-familiar space outside one’s own.”

Image: Mural at SFSU Malcolm X Plaza

Said’s Orientalism is the frame by which we can understand the coverage of Qatar in the lead-up and during the period of hosting the World Cup. At the core, Western politicians and press coverage are saying Qatar, the Arabs and Muslims are not like us, meaning “normal and civilized” humans that are living in pursuit of their hopes, dreams, aspiration and filled like every part of the world with all types of contradictions.

The focus on Qatar and the hosting of the World Cup is rooted in Western discourses that are rooted first and foremost in Said’s Orientalist imagined geography and making distinctions (some valid while others are totally fictitious) then building a racist and Islamophobic edifice on its basis. I build on Said’s work and assert the existence of an Islamophobic imagined geography that makes Muslim spaces and societies the location of the “contemporary barbarians” that must be kept at bay from the gates of “Western Civilization” whereby the World Cup tournament is the symbolic door, and the hosting is the key permitting entry to it.

Certainly, Islamophobia has many manifestations and takes on many forms be it directed toward individuals, groups, or Muslim states around the world. Islamophobia is at work in western press coverage of the 2022 Qatar World Cup and the exceptional framing directed at the country and its Islamic values. The terms used for the World Cup is reeking with Islamophobic tropes and demonization even when some of the issues raised are valid. Are we to believe that Western governments and the press are so keen on supporting Human Rights, migrants and labor rights that Qatar is located outside the “international norm” that they should be in a category of their own! Western imagined geography makes it to be the case and insists on this reductionist and racist framing.

In the case of the World Cup, Islamophobia manifest itself in the insistence that Western “norms” are the arbiter of what human rights is, and what is not. Never mind that over the past 100 plus years and at present, the primary violators of human rights (both in its Western and global South norms) have been Western countries including the illegal invasion of Iraq that killed upward of 1,000,000 people and the ongoing interventions in Syria and Libya that made millions refugees and destroyed functioning societies-let’s be clear the primary reason for it is oil and domination of energy resources in an attempt to contain China’s rising power and Russia’s role in Europe.

I know that some Smart Alec is going to jump and say that whataboutism is not a sufficient defense or counter argument, which I agree in principle but when those speaking on human, immigrants and labor rights are ill-qualified themselves to offer moral or ethical examples then pointing to the contradiction is relevant and important.

Human rights are used as an Islamophobic tool to make the Muslim category an exceptional class to the norms of the “global” society. Let be very clear that the term “global” is itself a product of imagined geographies and is often introduced to mean the universalization of Western particularism at the expense of the majority of the world that is non-White and non-Western.

Here, the discussion on LGBTQI and labor rights issues are an important ongoing global debate underway across the world including the US and Western Europe. However, in the context of Qatar’s hosting of the World Cup, the arguments are utilized as virtue signaling by Western powers while absolving themselves from the persistent demonization and violence committed against the racial and gendered other.

The political debates and coverage of Qatar created what I call the Islamophobic imagined geography that builds on Edward Said’s idea of Orientalist imagined geography. The Islamophobic imagined geography views and reduces everything to a series of negations and erasures to the extent that the landscape and the people that inhabit it are treated as an alien species not belonging to the human family.

In the Islamophobic imagined geography, the Muslim individual, and the states they inhabit are deemed to be beyond redemption, inferior and the negative opposite of the “enlightened, progressive and quintessential human,” which is the Western person, and the Western States are projected to constitute the “real and substantive” civilized geography.

Documented abuses of immigrants in US detention sites- Source: https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org

In the realm of the “real and substantive” Western geography, tens of thousands of immigrants are held indefinitely in “detention” camps with no human rights or basic services. Why are all these people held and refused entry into the “civilized human rights” realm of Western geography? They are held for no other reason than their skin color and for escaping the interventionist western wars or neoliberal economic machination that are imposed by the IMF and the World Bank on the Global South in the postcolonial era. This year alone, in the “real and substantive” Western geography, over 2,200 refugees and migrants died opposite the “civilized” shores of Europe and almost 25,000 deaths since 2014. Important to note that European Union immigration regulation prohibits and imposes fines on anyone who lends a hand to those that are drowning on the shores of the “real and substantive civilized geography” and the realm of “human rights” where only certain humans are endowed with rights.

View the full article on the New Yorker link: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/12/06/the-secretive-libyan-prisons-that-keep-migrants-out-of-europe

On a more serious note, what companies in the Western world had had contracts to build the World Cup infrastructure in Qatar over the past 20 years? What were their labor standards, how many employees died under their supervision, and have they been held responsible for the role they played in the construction projects or cause of death? Also, since this is a FIFA program and Qatar is the host country, then the question is what is their responsibility or accountability assuming all what is being offered or reported is accurate? Why is it today and just as the World Cup is underway that this is the issue that frames the games for Western elites and societies and nothing else?

Source: https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org

The double standards and hypocrisy are nauseating to say the least. At this point, I do need to bring Palestine and the ongoing Israeli military and settler assault on the Palestinians that resulted in the death of almost two Palestinians every week and mostly children. If the Western powers want to give moral and human rights lessons to Qatar, the Arab and Muslim Worlds, then the first address and station they should park their Eurocentric diplomatic and media carvan is Palestine and the unfolding catastrophe they created, funded, defended, protected, and stoked for the past 75 plus years.

Images of Palestinian children killed by Israeli military attacks on Gaza in 2021.

Yes, Qatar 2022 World Cup gives you the opportunity to pontificate freely without having to address or even offer a mild apology to the past and ongoing genocides in various Muslim lands, Palestine being center stage but not the only one. I can list all the countries in the Global South to make the point, which might get you million frequent travel miles if BBC, political elites and the Western press can take an apology and compensation tour before arriving at the World Cup. Also, if you are traveling then make sure to stop at the Guantanamo torture gulag and demand its immediate closer.

Yes, Muslims are socially conservative, but this does not mean that public discourse is not able to discuss and debate issues that run contrary or opposite their values. Western norms are not universal, never been and should not be the measure of all things considering the bloody and painful history of attempts to impose this imperial Eurocentric standard. Do Muslim states have work today to live up to their own professed ideals? Yes, for sure and I will be the first to assert this need. I am as critical of Arab and Muslim states on several fronts but not through the imposed Eurocentric norms that exceptionalizes and demonizes the Muslim and Arab category.

It is important to state a certain fact, which tends to be ignored or completely erased when it comes to discussions of Qatar and the Arab and Muslim world in general. The Muslim world accounts for over 25% of the world population, which is racially, ethnically, and nationally diverse. Critically, Muslim populations are present across Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, which means that a reductionist and otherized notion of who the Muslims are and what ideological, social and political views they hold are complex and nuanced that Western media stereotypes refuses to acknowledge or unable to get out of their Eurocentric studios to see the world as is, rather than what the Islamophobic selective and ideologically framed camera lens makes it to be.

The BBC found it fit not to air the opening ceremonies while opting to give a reporter a free run into a moralizing commentary that is more suited and fitting for the British royal family and government for their responsibility in the invasion of Iraq (Abu Ghraib prison included) or continued benefit from GCC countries. Maybe the BBC could have spent time to list the various GCC, Arab and Muslim world holdings in the UK that are facilitated and pursued by British and European countries.

I might be a little distracted from the day-to-day European football world but what are the financial links between the English Premier League and GCC countries and how is it that so many stadiums and club uniforms are branded with various Gulf airlines. More to the point, how much are the GCC deposits in British, European and American banking institutions as well as the economic links in the oil and natural gas sectors. Giving empty human rights editorials while cashing-in and depositing daily returns from the Gulf economies is the highest levels of hypocrisy.

Source: https://www.freedomforimmigrants.org

The Islamophobic imagined geography makes Qatar to be the gulag for labor with death taking in every corner due to construction negligence related to the World Cup. Every death on the job is painful for the family and the loss goes beyond a mere number or a statistic. We can and should think of the loss of a person who have so many who loved and cherished them while waiting their return home from hard and difficult work. What is adding insult is the use of workers death on the job in Qatar to score Islamophobic and Eurocentric point; rather than finding whether their families have been taken care of and improving the work conditions that caused the harm in the first place.

The issue of workers death and job-related sickness is a global one and the Western countries and the press should spend the time and effort to remedy and fix the conditions effecting labor in their own countries. As far as construction industry, the US had 4,764 workers deaths on the job in 2020 alone, which comes to 3.4 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers and 13 individuals lose their life on the job on a daily basis. Yet, the press and politicians find comfort in rebuking Qatar on labor rights while look the other way when 13 American workers lose their life daily while often legal protection is extended to the corporations rather than the individuals who died or their families.

In broader examination of labor deaths around the globe, “the International Labor Organization estimates that some 2.3 million women and men around the world succumb to work-related accidents or diseases every year; this corresponds to over 6000 deaths every single day. Worldwide, there are around 340 million occupational accidents and 160 million victims of work-related illnesses annually. The ILO updates these estimates at intervals, and the updates indicate an increase of accidents and ill health.”

The BBC human rights editorializing did not find a problem with broadcasting the opening ceremonies of the Chinese hosted Olympics despite the country being held responsible for an ongoing genocide. I guess the Olympics in China did not produce the same type of imagined Islamophobic geography that would have warranted such a censorship (I do believe anti-Asian sentiments and racism exists in the west and this question relates only to China as a state). In the UK and across Europe, Palestine and Palestinian narrative are censored while sending weapons and using Israeli surveillance technology is given no scrutiny or even a mild rebuke. Are we to believe that Western approach to human rights and labor rights is not a highly selective and political matter!

* This blog post has previously been published at: https://medium.com/foundation-of-african-americans-for-civic/qatars-world-cup-islamophobia-imagined-geography-western-hypocrisy-42c1138ca884

Author’s bio

Hatem Bazian is Executive Director, Islamophobia Studies Center. Professor, Zaytuna College, Lecturer in Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures & Asian Ameri. Studies, UC Berkeley.