On Tenderness, Joy, and Intergenerational Indebtedness: Reflections on the Decolonial Potentialities of the World Cup

A mural of Achraf Hakimi and his mother in Barcelona. Photo via B/R Football on Twitter. A mural of Achraf Hakimi and his mother in Barcelona. Photo via B/R Football on Twitter.

On Tenderness, Joy, and Intergenerational Indebtedness: Reflections on the Decolonial Potentialities of the World Cup

By : Nadia Guessous

[This article is part of a special dossier on Morocco in the 2022 Fifa World Cup. Read the introduction to this dossier here.]

As a diasporic Moroccan woman living in the US and a scholar of the transnational politics of affect, gender, and sexuality, watching the broadcast and media coverage of the Moroccan football team in the 2022 World Cup was to experience an exhilarating, liberatory, and soul-nurturing sense of recognition, belonging, and hope that I am unlikely to ever forget.

The historic significance of the Moroccan team making it to the semi-finals despite relatively fewer resources compared to better endowed teams from the Global North was certainly a big part of this exhilaration. Winning against the teams of three former colonial powers (Belgium, Spain, and Portugal) where members of the Moroccan diaspora are frequently ostracized and demonized was also a big part of it. However, it was the affective and transnational dimensions of watching the game and the counternarrative that it offered about diasporic Moroccan subjectivity that I found most fascinating. Indeed, I would like to suggest that the Moroccan players (and here I will be mostly focusing on the diasporic players on the team) challenged dominant assumptions about Moroccan/North African/Muslim/immigrant masculinity while at the same time speaking back to notions of Western superiority and benevolence through their expressions of affection and indebtedness towards their immigrant mothers. In doing so, they reminded us of the liberatory and political significance of the felt and the intimate in resisting the dehumanization of minoritized, racialized, and marginalized subjects on the global stage.      

When I think back on my experience watching Morocco’s participation in the World Cup, it was the moments of tenderness (lutf), affection (hanan), intimacy and utter delight between the players and their parents after the games that most moved me and that I found most significant. This includes when Achraf Hakimi, who was born in Madrid to working-class immigrant parents, ran to his mother in a memorable embrace after winning the game against Belgium and then again did the same thing after scoring the winning penalty against Spain; these embraces have now been memorialized in the form of a mural in a Moroccan neighborhood in Barcelona [see image]. It also includes the scene of Soufiane Boufal joyfully dancing with his mother on the field, a mother to whom he has declared his love and gratitude in numerous declarations. Wearing a modest golden jellaba and scarf on her head, dancing, hugging her son, affectionately kissing his hands, she embodied a proud and loving, working-class, immigrant, Moroccan and Muslim subjectivity; together they projected an image of diasporic Moroccan love, pride, joy, intimacy, and complicity that we rarely get to see on mainstream and Western television.

To me as a Moroccan diasporic subject who spent the first half of my life in Morocco, these tender moments of love, affection, complicity, and unmediated joy are very familiar. They remind me of home and of the abundance of love, support, and affection that characterized my everyday life and interactions with my immediate and extended family, friends, loved ones, and community while growing up in Morocco. They remind me of my late father’s complete and total embrace of his vulnerability, which he was never afraid to show, and which was one of his most endearing qualities. They also remind me of the larger moral universe in which I grew up in Morocco, where displays of love and affection between family members (and especially between parents and their children) are often mediated by and intertwined with Islamic moral norms; for example, the notion that motherhood is a virtue and a form of worship, that loving one’s parents is a moral obligation, that the blessing of parents (rdat al-walidin) is of the highest form, and that showing tenderness and care towards fellow Muslims and creatures of God (including animals and nature) is essential to being a good Muslim. Thus, to kiss the forehead or hand of a mother or father is to express love and affection from within an Islamic moral habitus, and is thus saturated with specific histories, moral, affective, and embodied economies that parochialize universalizing assumptions about love, affection, parenting, and childhood. 

What was new and exhilarating to me as a diasporic Moroccan subject was to see such familiar displays of affection, intimacy, complicity, vulnerability, and Moroccan/Muslim subjectivity on TV while sitting in my living room in the US, watching a mainstream channel and a transnational sports event, and knowing that they were available for the whole world (the world cup watching world, that is) to see. What was also new to me is that these moments of spontaneous and genuine connection on the part of the Moroccan players and their families were not accompanied or at least not overtaken by vitriolic Islamophobic racist discourses warning us about the putative dangers and barbarism of Moroccan culture and Muslim patriarchy. Instead, they were celebrated all over the media and the subject of much positive commentary. Indeed, the media landscape that I have grown most accustomed to as a diasporic Moroccan and Muslim subject living in the US in a post 9/11 world is one that homogenizes, essentializes, and dehumanizes Moroccan and Muslim subjects, a media landscape that is saturated with vilifying and orientalist narratives about places like Morocco that are associated in dominant Western imagination with violence, oppression, patriarchy, and fanaticism above all else (with occasional patronizing and equally colonial platitudes about how beautiful the country is nevertheless, and how hospitable the people are).[1] 

So, what was new for me was to experience an almost shocking sense of affective, moral, and spiritual recognition, of familiarity, and vicarious warmth and tenderness from my home in the US (rather than in person during visits to Morocco or among Moroccan diasporic family/friends in the US) and while watching a transnational sporting event. This is a feeling, the fullness and uniqueness of which I am likely to never forget, and it is one that I know I am not alone in having been greatly impacted by.[2] This is what it is like to experience a non-stigmatized and non-demonized subjectivity, to dwell in recognition, to feel seen and heard and felt and connected and proud on one’s own terms rather than through the distorting lenses of Orientalism, colonialism, and anti-Muslim racism.          

Indeed, at the risk of sounding naïve (although I can think of worse sins in these times of chronic cynicism and disillusionment), I would suggest that affectively charged moments like these during Morocco’s participation in the World Cup enabled Moroccans, at home and in the diaspora, as well their many supporters worldwide, and especially from the Global Majority, to collectively and unapologetically revel in the joys and pleasures of an affective geography of intimacy that cuts across national boundaries, what I would call a decolonial affective habitus, that is rarely allowed in dominant Western discourses and representations. While this decolonial affective takeover (or interlude) lasted for only a fleeting moment and will certainly not undo the violence of centuries of colonial and imperial domination, the willful misrepresentation and dehumanization of North Africans, Middle Easterners, and Muslims that characterize our present, or the hardships that the majority of Moroccans at home and in the diaspora have to endure on a daily basis, the liberatory potentialities of the sense of affective fullness that it enabled should not in my view be underestimated. If nothing else, these moments and the intense feelings of recognition, hope, and belonging, as well as pride and joy, that they engendered can help us better articulate and critique the depth of invisibility and dehumanization that otherwise saturates mainstream media landscapes. It can also help us imagine a world where the complexity and fullness of marginalized, racialized, minoritized, and formerly colonized subjects is respected, honored, and celebrated on a regular basis rather than only under exceptional circumstances. The fact that the players and their mothers come from working-class families and regions/communities of Morocco that do not often get to represent Moroccanness on the global stage is also equally important in thinking about the political significance of these moments both nationally and transnationally.    

These moments of collective tenderness, vulnerability, joy, love, and affection between the players and their families are also significant in the ways that they speak back to dominant Western discourses and assumptions about gender and masculinity in Morocco/North Africa. Indeed, as many scholars of gender, sexuality, immigration, and anti-Muslim racism have shown, the legacies of colonialism and Orientalism continue to mediate the racialization, stigmatization, and criminalization of immigrant and diasporic communities from North Africa and the Middle East in Euro-America.[3] In particular, they have shown the prevalence of a dominant racializing discourse that exceptionalizes the patriarchal nature of North African/Muslim/Arab/immigrant masculinity and saturates it above all else with negative affects and attributes such as violence, domination, sexual repression, rigidity, fanaticism, intolerance, aggressivity, and hyper-virility. This essentializing discourse is then used to justify the policing, surveillance, discrimination against, and stigmatization of immigrant men from North Africa and their descendants in the name of defending women’s rights and gender equality.

Given all this and the important role of affect in producing moral panic about Moroccan/North African/Muslim masculinity in Euro-America, the loving and affectionate hugs and kisses, joyful dances on the field, and other gestures of complicity and intimacy that the Moroccan players shared with their families, and especially with their mothers, have, I would argue, put on display for all who are willing to see just how dehumanizing these dominant discourses have, in contrast, tended to be.  Put differently, one could say that if Morocco’s participation in the World Cup gave Moroccans and their supporters an opportunity to experience an exhilarating sense of intimacy and affective recognition on the world stage, Western viewers who have grown accustomed to associating North African/Muslim/immigrant men with danger, violence and domination will have experienced, in contrast, a sense of surprise, dissonance, and disorientation while watching the World Cup; the latter is especially the case given that the diasporic players on the team represent both Euro-America and Morocco by virtue of their dual citizenships. This suggests that the affective and the intimate can operate as important sites of decolonial liberation as well as destabilization of hegemonic taxonomies.         

In addition, I think that it is especially important that the diasporic Moroccan players’ affection towards their mothers was accompanied with expressions of recognition and indebtedness towards their working-class families who immigrated to various parts of Euro-America in search of better economic opportunities and had to overcome many hardships to enable their sons to build their soccer careers. This gratitude and the affection through which it is expressed is significant in many ways. It is an inter-generational recognition of the sacrifices made by immigrant parents who faced racism, discrimination, and xenophobia while trying to make a living and to adapt to the expectations and norms of Western host countries and being subject to constant scrutiny, racial profiling, and moral panic about the so-called Muslim or immigrant takeover of Europe/North America. Indeed, I have been struck by the fact that many of the diasporic Moroccan players who expressed gratitude towards their immigrant parents offered nuanced and intersectional narratives that avoid the glorification of the West as a putative refuge or haven for immigrants from Morocco. In doing so, they have pushed back against dominant Western discourses and expectations that demand gratitude from immigrants and their descendants whom they imagine themselves to have rescued from a life of wretchedness, poverty, and oppression. Instead, the diasporic Moroccan players’ narratives foreground the hardships that their families experienced in Europe itself and the many sacrifices that they had to endure as racialized minorities and stigmatized immigrants/workers to survive. Achraf Hakimi for example has spoken out against the racism that he faced in both Spain and France, and the hardships that his parents endured while working in precarious and low-paid jobs in Spain. Soufiane Boufal has similarly described the difficulties that his mother faced as a single parent and immigrant in France and the ways in which she sacrificed everything to support his career.   

While some might argue that a focus on motherly sacrifice merely reinscribes gendered norms and upholds the notion that women’s primary role is to support their families as mothers, I think it is significant to bring an intersectional reading to these narratives and to pay attention to the fact that the motherly sacrifices being honored here are subaltern ones that have to do with a working-class, minoritized, and immigrant positionality. They are in other words as much about class, race, and citizenship status as they are about gender. In addition, I think it is important to think about how the focus on parental, and especially motherly, hardship and sacrifices in the diasporic players’ narratives challenges the White savior discourse of the West and the assumption that Moroccan/North African/Muslim/immigrant women are always better off living in the West than in their home countries. Indeed, it this were the case, the Moroccan players give us an opportunity to ask, then why would so many sacrifices on the part of their immigrant mothers be needed in the first place?    

In sum, the Moroccan team has taught us that fighting for dignity and freedom can take many forms, including small and spontaneous gestures of love, tenderness, affection, gratitude, and joy that speak (back to empire, racism, and other forms of exclusion) in ways that are deeply felt, viscerally memorable, and louder than words.



[1] For a fascinating discussion of the biopolitics of beauty and its entanglements with empire, see Mimi Nguyen, 2011. “The Biopower of Beauty: Humanitarian Imperialisms and Global Feminisms in an Age of Terror,” Signs 26(2): 359-83; and “The Right to be Beautiful,” The Account.   


[2] See for example, the wonderfully enthusiastic, inspiring and insightful articles by the Moroccan scholars Aomar Boum and Brahim el Guabli, “Everyone has a Stake in Morocco’s Football Team,” The Markaz Review (December 15, 2022); and Hisham Aïdi, “The (African) Arab Cup,” Africa Is a Country (December 12, 2022).    


[3] See for example Mehammed Amadeus Mack, 2017. Sexagon: Muslims, France, and the Sexualization of National Culture (Fordham University Press); Sara Farris, 2017. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism (Duke University Press); Lila Abu-Lughod, 2015. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Harvard University Press); Mayanthi Fernando, 2014. The Republic Unsettled: Muslim French and the Contradictions of Secularism (Duke University Press); Miriam Ticktin, 2011. Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press); Katherine Ewing, 2008.  Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford University Press); Nacira Guénif-Souilamas and Eric Macé, 2004. Les féministes et le garçon arabe (Editions de l’Aube) ; and Nacira Guénif-Souilamas, 2021 « Fabrique, usage et circulation d’images stéréotypées. »

Mauritania's Failure to Adapt Gender-Based Violence Laws

While rape is often underreported globally, women in Mauritania have a very specific reason to underreport: fear of criminalization. According to research published in 2018 by Human Rights Watch, many Mauritanian women who reported being raped were subsequently arrested for the Islamic crime of Zinā, or fornication. Women who do not provide sufficient evidence of rape are often not believed and can face imprisonment for a minimum of four years. While police demand a great amount of evidence from the victim, HRW points out that the state of Mauritania has limited forensic capacity to investigate rape. The circumstance of rape victims being accused of Zinā is perhaps the most obvious human rights abuse in the application of the law but it is far from the only troubling consequence. Zinā has been invoked in cases of men and women being alone together in public, foreign employees working in private homes without proper documentation, and to persecute sex workers. What is perplexing in all of these instances is that both Mauritanian law, partly derived from the French code civil, and Islamic law have more specific and appropriate mechanisms for all of these situations. Why the overextension of Zinā, and how can it be changed?

Modern applications of Zinā by Islamic constitutions diverge significantly from classical sources. The Quranic definition of Zinā is straightforwardly limited to sexual intercourse between two consenting and unmarried parties, and a Zinā accusation requires four eyewitnesses to the act itself. This makes it very difficult to accuse another person. A position paper by Karamah, a group of Muslim women lawyers who advocate for human rights, discusses the validity of Zinā in terms of modern national law versus Islamic jurisprudence. The paper discusses human rights problems stemming from Zinā laws in Pakistan, which operate in a remarkably similar way to the application of Zinā in Mauritania; both laws conflate fornication and rape. Karamah highlights the difference between the quranic source and modern construct, which mainly relate to forgiveness and the categorization of sin. Quranic sources place much greater emphasis on forgiveness than punishment in regard to Zinā. Zinā constitutes two different levels of sin: sin against God and sin against the community. A sin against God is personal, and cannot be forgiven by human authorities, while a sin against the community can be punished or forgiven by the community itself. Zinā can therefore only be categorized as a sin against the community when it is publicly known; otherwise, it is the responsibility of the individual to repent. According to Karamah, the special emphasis  put on protecting the innocent by the way it was written in the Quran. Witnesses needed to be men, where an act of Zinā is more likely to be committed in spaces dominated by women at the time of the creation of such laws. This also suggests that it was thought more likely for a woman to be falsely accused. The position paper also stated it would be better to let the guilty get away with the crime than to punish the innocent.

The broader modern interpretation of Zinā rose alongside the birth of Islamic constitutionalism in the 1980s. Many Islamic constitutions, including Mauritania’s, came into being as a response to colonialism. In the post-colonial era, many Muslim-majority countries saw Western bureaucratic norms as a failure, especially economically, by the end of the 1970s. Islamic constitutions marry Shariah laws to governmental structures left behind from colonial rule, encoding a permanent tension between the two. The Mauritanian constitution is no exception to this trend. Islamic law in the Mauritanian constitution is often far from specific, and indeed the Mauritanian constitution states all Islamic law is binding.

This legal tension played out in the recent battle to offer clearer laws protecting victims of rape in Mauritania. In November 2019, a new law was proposed with the full support of the newly elected administration entitled “Law to protect women and young girls.” Proposed changes to the law focus on different types of gendered violence, touching on issues of emotional, domestic, and sexual violence. The law gives a broad definition of violence, discussing a ‘culture of suffering’, ‘impacting harm’, and ‘control of women’s lives’.  While Mauritanian legal scholar Hamoud ould Ramdan critiqued this language as unclear, the broadness could perhaps also allow an evolving approach to understanding violence. Ramdan also saw controversy in the law giving women permission to leave their homes without a male family member’s permission if they were fleeing situations of violence, which could be in direct opposition to Shariah law. The law defines emotional violence as controlling women’s private lives, and both sexual and domestic violence can be paired with establishment of a women’s right to bodily autonomy. The law would create a formal definition of rape, remove the statuate of limitation for reporting rape, and articulate distinct punishments in the penal code between rape and attempted rape. Beyond establishing legal language, the law would also form the creation of judicial, health, and social support for survivors of violence.

Like all Mauritanian laws proposed in the senate, it had the seal of approval from the Minister of Islamic Affairs, meaning that it was in compliance with Shar’iah law. Many Mauritanian women’s rights activists saw aspects of the bill as a victory, especially the legal definition of rape, and thought that the bill, having the support of the administration, would be certain to pass. Surprisingly, the law was quickly moved into review and was sent back twice by the senate. This is virtually unheard of for a law that has the support of the executive branch of the government. In reaction to the law, a critique was issued called the Petition of Imams, written by a group comprised mostly of Islamic scholars. The group also includes many members of the Mauritanian High Council of Fatwa. The authors of the petition objected that Shar’iah law is not mentioned in the law itself as a justification for the law’s existence. This criticism claims the law is premised on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Beijing Declaration of 1995. The group declared the law haram and compared it to pork. Interestingly enough, the criticism was more focused on the source of the law than the specifics, as none of the aspects that Ramdan saw as being anti-Shar’iah were mentioned.

Women’s rights activists in the capital of Nouakchott objected immediately. Hashtags were created, conferences were held, and protests were organized in favor of the law. One of the most prominent activists was Dickle Dia. Herself a survivor of incest, she grew up seeing domestic violence as an inescapable fact of life in her village. Dia believes that the best way to support Mauritanian women escaping violence is to facilitate economic independence. This guides the vision behind her NGO “AFPHY” which creates cooperatives of rural female potters and finds modern applications for traditional goods. AFPHY organized a conference in partnership with the United Nations Population Fund and the NGOs One Young World and Thrive to discuss this law. Dia acknowledges the power Islamists have in her country, and listed some of the reasons why this law upsets them (e.g. making fathers acknowledge children, which would end the practice of secret second marriages), although she states that this law contains nothing against Islam or the Quran. Her solution to passing the law is lobbying, but with one particular actor needing to take a stronger role. She stated if the UN were to pressure the Mauritanian government, they would follow suit.

Marietta Diagana, the head of Women Rights at the Mauritanian office of the UN High Commission on Human Rights, also supports the law. Diagana has had a long career working on the rights of women in Mauritania. and shared her experience working at the women’s prison in Nouakchott from 2005-2010. From her estimations, 6 out of 10 prisoners were sentenced with the crime of Zinā. Diagana believes that Mauritanian life is rapidly changing, and that the definition of Zinā is changing as well, “There are many things that are clear in Islam but people interpret how they want to,” she said.

In a country grappling with rapid social and cultural change, the authority of religion was seen as something that would remain static and somehow preserve stability.

Some women’ rights activists believe that this is not the law they would want on a personal level, but that it could be workable at a national level. This position is not one that Mauritanian women rights activists can take publicly. In rural parts of the country, customary law and tribal law supersede both regional and national rule. The family unit and ethnicity may be much more likely to impact a decision about sexual or domestic violence than the court of law. On the law Jamil Mansour, the former leader of the Islamic Brotherhood Party and major political actor, and typically a necessary political ally to accomplish any goal, took a tone of general indifference. He argued that most decisions about women’ rights will take place at a tribal level regardless of the national legal framework. Regarding the law, he said he would wait to see if it was implemented in a way that respects Islam before taking action.

Mauritania has undergone rapid demographic and cultural changes in the past few decades. The country has rapidly urbanized due to droughts in the 1980s, which saw the population switch from being roughly 75 percent nomadic and 25 percent sedentary to the present inverse.  Diagana remarked that the popularity of the law among women in the capital indicated a broader change in the country. “Women are conscious now. Women study and work...In the nomadic culture, life was simpler.” In a country grappling with rapid social and cultural change, the authority of religion was seen as something that would remain static and somehow preserve stability. However, the application of Islamic law is also in cultural upheaval.

After months of lobbying and action, the law failed quietly. While cultural change is a factor in the shifting understanding of Zinā and Mauritanian law specifically, the debate around the origins of Zinā laws can be seen as part of a greater debate about the compatibility of social change with an Islamic framework. This debate was prominently featured by the opponents of the new law, who mostly paid more attention to the origin of the law than to its details. Legal scholars Ahmed & Ginsburg (2015) wrote about the creation of new Islamic constitutions in the wake of the Arab Spring, and the reaction of some American politicians. For some American commentators they argued, “the choice between Islam and democracy is a zero-sum game”. In fact, the viewpoint of mainstream Islamists may not be so different from that of many womens’-rights focused NGOs, that uncritically implement Western secular norms. The Mauritanian activists supporting stronger laws understand that they need to tread more carefully, working with what is possible in the current Mauritanian cultural context. Both Diagana and Dia see the “sensibilization” of Islamic leaders as a necessary step to creating lasting change in their country. Diagana believes that most of the Islamic leaders acting against the law are unaware of its contents. Creating a human rights narrative that embraces Islam and is inclusive of Islamic figures will make change more palatable to a society facing rapid cultural and social transformations. Dia’s work centers on this, albeit at a less abstract level, as the female potters employ traditional techniques that can be employed in modern construction and are more suited for the climate of Mauritania than foriegn concrete. Dia argues that Western authorities often overlook the value of traditional knowledge; this applies equally to the dexterity with which Mauritanian activists are navigating political change in their society.