“It’s booked. Be on the pitch for 6.50pm.” In the middle of life, I open this WhatsApp beaming at the chance to play on a sunny Sunday. I rush across London from planning lessons in a coffee shop, scrambling to get my shin pads on at 6:53pm. I arrive at the astro at 7:14pm having prayed Asr, being beckoned to play bibs by a Somali striker who flies across the pitch twirling into a clean goal with her Abaya trailing the green terrain. The overground passes through and being in goal gives me a perspective of who to keep an eye on when I come out and go into my beloved left-back (defence) position. I am home here.

The love I have for football is shared by millions of people around the world across different class backgrounds. From the Favelas to the 14th arrondissement to Gaza, the simplicity and creativity that football elicits makes it the sport of the people. Football since its inception, has had the potential to improve working class people’s material conditions. As Mickael Correia describes in his book ‘A People’s History of Football’,

“Kicking a ball is a pure and simple pleasure” involving “team spirit, moving the ball around as collective work, the physical confrontation in making a tackle, and the aesthetic joy in the ‘beautiful move’”. This is a near universal feeling. Hence the global reach of football with approximately 30 million women around the world playing the game.

Despite this radical vision of sport, there are many barriers Muslim women face in sports participation that include football. The Muslimah Sports Association commissioned a ‘Muslim Women in Sports Report’ in 2023 which found that among women who reported being unlikely or very unlikely to participate in their chosen sport 64% of responders cited “the lack of women’s facilities” adding that they “could not find comfortable environments to play sport in”. One 34-year-old woman from the report cited racism and the lack of modest attire as one of the challenges she faced in football.

Accessibility and the Importance of Community-Led Movements

I play football in a borough that experienced devastating cuts affecting the opportunities I had to participate in sports once I left school. In 2015, Brent Council made the decision to cut £1 million in funding for youth services leaving just £400,000 to be distributed among 300 youth providers in the area. Due to local football hero Jason Roberts’ foundation, we have a permanent arena that was able to weather the tumult of the austerity era and be one of the last sanctuaries for members of the local community to access sports.

As a result, a group of women in 2019 were able to form a women’s league and chip in to rent pitches for weekly matches. As of this year, Sundays are a fixture in the calendar for women like me to come together for a friendly kickabout.

Similarly, in the summer of 2019, two sisters, Siham and Sagal Abdullahi sought to “create a space for Muslim and minoritised women and girls to play the beautiful game”. Sagal recalls playing football non-stop because it was one of the only free things she and her sister could afford growing up. But noted that it became increasingly difficult to find spaces that accommodated the needs of Muslim women. They co-founded Barakah LDN, a grassroots and community-centred female football collective based in Fulham that aims to get women and girls from minoritised backgrounds (Muslim / BAME / Working Class) into football and coaching.

Football in principle is a sport that can be accessible to all. You see it being played in refugee camps, school playgrounds and one of the few English Sports where working-class people achieve social mobility. However, while access to sports and health services is a right, not a privilege, the 2010s austerity policies in the UK oversaw a £1.6 million cut to grassroots football funding by Sport England in 2014 which cut off thousands of working-class people from the beautiful game.

Sagal acknowledges, “A lot of times it can be expensive to attend football sessions, especially if you have to travel by train and pay for the actual session – it can price out a lot of working-class Muslims.”

Spiritual Benefits of Football and An Ode to My Sunday Football

I believe that the spiritual benefits of the sport come directly from it being a team sport with working class roots. Siham elaborates that, “having a consistent and safe space to go every week creates structure and routine, provides a sense of comfort and importantly facilitates for Muslim women to maintain good physical and mental health.”

For me, football benefits me mentally and spiritually. It helps me maintain regular weekly exercise, has helped me overcome body image issues as I focus on developing my skill and strategy instead of a particular physique, and it has helped me connect with fellow Muslim women who are incredible.

My local team embodies team spirit through its composition of club football players and novices, evenly weighted across teams when we play games. There are no glory seeking strikers; experienced players pass the ball to new players chanting “shoot yallah shoot” and if they miss they say “unlucky” and compliment the effort. This is a far cry from being sworn at for a bad pass when playing sports in school. The toxicity of Secondary School PE is abandoned as women come together to release the pressures of working life, parenting and caring responsibilities.

Playing football is an outlet that is healing us as a community: a postpartum mother, a newlywed, a graduate, we are all women in different seasons of life and yet, we unify for the love of sport. When I travel down the pitch, I don’t think of how I run or how I look. That is because I know I am not judged, not even on my football skills. I feel genuine acceptance even when I handball once or twice…a game.

Most significantly, football’s spiritual benefits are that they remind me of Allah (SWT)’s blessings and provisions. Once I was playing a game in Southall – the location of the greatest football comedy of all time ‘Bend it like Beckham.’ It started to pour with rain and we carried on playing for a few more minutes. Drenched in good old British weather, I felt alive and thankful to Allah (SWT) for reigniting the spark in me after being dimmed by depression for years. This moment reminded me of how Islam talks about rain.

“It is Allah who sends the winds, and they stir the clouds and spread them in the sky however He wills, and He makes them fragments so you see the rain emerge from within them. And when He causes it to fall upon whom He wills of His servants, immediately they rejoice.” (Surah Ar-Rum 30:48)

I rejoiced because Allah (SWT) showed me mercy and blessed me with the chance to find my way back to a sport that I have a lifelong love of. A sport that I can enjoy with fellow Muslimahs who make me want to be a better Muslim but also offer a safe space from exercise being about ‘improving my body’. This joy however, is not individualistic; I believe it is shared which is the beauty of the game. The principles of teamwork transcend the sport and reflect the possibilities of our world. Football can help us imagine a more egalitarian world where we each contribute to the collective success and happiness of those in our community.

Siham echoed the sentiment when asked what football means to Barakah, “We know that in our faith, exercise is a sunnah and taking care of the body we have been blessed with is incredibly important. It can even be a form of worship if done with the correct intentions. To be able to do this in a female-only and safe environment is something we don’t take for granted! We ask Allah to reward us for this work and purify our intentions to remain a benefit and barakah to the community. Ameen.”

Social football establishes the conditions for this communal joy because it is not monetised; we play for the love of playing and our faith is intertwined with our game play. But I do not mean this on an individual level. The redistributive and just nature of our faith marries well with grassroots football.

I could talk about how we pause our games to pray Maghrib, or the spectrum of modesty from oversized hoodies to jilbaab-wearing midfielders: blitzing the pitch to score a hatrick or the post match mint teas and baklava at a Syrian cafe where we talk about our faith and goals. But in saying that football has emancipatory potential, I want to instead share how this team builds community in a way that only grassroots football could.

I was inspired to write this article after seeing the football against apartheid (later genocide) bloc at demonstrations for Palestinian liberation. I would also see my teammates at several of these protests. These two interactions clarified that football isn’t just an outlet or safe space with fellow Muslim women, it can be a force of social good that Muslim women are agents of.

I don’t want to take for granted the privilege I have to feel that joy weekly which I owe to the Jason Roberts Foundation and the women behind the scenes who organise our games and demonstrate solidarity on and off the pitch locally and internationally.

Solidarity as a Verb in Football

The game itself may not free the working class from wage labour, but it frees working class people by offering them an affordable outlet from the stress of working life. Recently Iqra Ismail, a female Muslim coach, hosted a women’s-only Euros final screening at Action Community Centre, raising money for ‘The Gift of Vision’ campaign. This provided a space for Muslim women to enjoy the game with like-minded individuals, away from the drinking culture associated with English football. The funds raised went to help Yemeni people in need of cataracts surgery.

This event reminded me of my own club connecting our game to wider struggles for justice by collecting late penalties and donating them to Medical Aid for Palestinians. Our group chat is used to share subsidised tickets to matches at Wembley for local residents who typically cannot afford a £150 – £450 ticket. Women from the team have mentored each other on changing careers, offering to check CVs and recommend free coding courses. Although this is not mutual aid by definition, it is a bulwark against the 14 years of austerity that have atomised communities like mine.

In 2017, Club Africain Supporters raised the banner “created by the poor, stolen by the rich” during a match against Paris Saint-Germain. Although, austerity threatened to widen the gulf between commercialised football and grassroots football, many people said no to their game being robbed from them. They reclaimed it through embodying the spirit of the game: utilising our different gifts to achieve a goal. For Barakah and the Jason Roberts Foundation, that was to ensure people from their communities had a safe place to make “the beautiful move.” The freedom that comes from self-organising as part of collectives meant that sessions could meet the needs of Muslim women which is why so many like me now regularly play football. But it is generosity embedded in the sport that allows for bigger change to be made from West London to the West Bank. Just as Liverpool fans sing “you will never walk alone”, Muslim women make the sport accessible to fellow Muslim women who bring their talents and skills to a passionate group. They connect football to international struggles for justice as intended by the poor who made the sport what it is.

How to get involved?

If you’d like to play football, try to find local groups and teams. If there’s none in your area, create one! There’s lots of support for how you can go about this online.

May Allah (SWT) reward the efforts of the women and organisations that continue to demonstrate solidarity as a verb through the beautiful game and provide the means for football to truly liberate all.

Iman Mohamed

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