Introduction: Is There a Middle Eastern Sport?

The significant cultural, political, and economic importance of Middle Eastern sports has only recently attracted the attention of scholars. Although sporadic academic studies appeared as early as the 1980s, we can identify the beginning of a “wave” of scholarship in the mid-1990s, which intensified in the early 2000s. These studies were mostly sociohistorical, sociological, and anthropological, and they tended to focus on the particular dynamics of certain countries, including Egypt, Turkey, Iran, and Israel/Palestine, with a smaller number on Yemen and Jordan. Thematically, this scholarship focused on nationalism, ethnic conflicts, class, and state–society relations, while the inclusion of gender analysis was the exception rather than the rule. More recent scholarship, since 2010, continues similar patterns, though we can identify the addition of three emerging trends The first trend relates to a power shift in international sports towards Middle Eastern countries with the awarding of mega sporting events to countries such as Bahrain, Qatar, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates. As a result of this shift, in the 2010s more scholarship has focused on business, management, and policy. Although this scholarship is not commonly represented in IJMES, It takes up a large share of the publications on Middle Eastern sports. In a parallel and almost completely separate path, the second trend is the growing recognition among historians and social scientists that sports are more than “metaphors” or “symbolic expressions” of the supposedly more important political processes that take place outside the stadium. Rather, dynamics in the sports sphere are an integral part of political processes and sometimes they take part in generating them. As Paul Silverstain puts it in this roundtable, these works are “placing what had been but a miscellaneous subject of Middle Eastern studies at the center of our understanding of the region.” More than in the past, recent studies frequently consider Middle Eastern sports as a contested terrain, where struggles over resources, meanings, and identities are constantly taking place. As this scholarship shows, these dynamics are related to developments in other spheres while retaining a certain degree of autonomy. In this roundtable, for example, Dag Tuastad illustrates how football constitutes a dominant arena for battles over political identities related to the Palestinian–Bedouin divide in Jordan, while John Blasing discusses Turkish football as a sphere of resistance to neoliberal globalization. Furthermore, whereas previous works on sports as contested terrains Int. J. Middle East Stud. 51 (2019), 465–467