Summary: The article dismisses the claim that football — or human-made rules generally — constitutes polytheism as illiterate and absurd. Game rules and constitutional law are categorically different things, and conflating them reflects a fundamental ignorance of covenantal legal philosophy. The deeper concern, however, is not the absurdity itself but its social consequences. The author traces how such simplistic reasoning, taken seriously by a small number of people, can escalate step by step into declarations of apostasy and justifications for violence — a pattern that has recurred across British Muslim communities for decades and contributed to real harm. Similar distortions around concepts like the caliphate and ḥākimiyyah have historically fed extremist movements and damaged civic life in the UK. The author’s call is to break the cycle: educate young people — particularly those from deprived backgrounds who are most vulnerable to such recruitment — and create an environment where ignorant and corruptive ideas find no foothold.
Football is only polytheism as some on social media tell us if you have a very warped view of what polytheism is, and what offends God. Does God eternally condemn a soul to the blazing fire for playing football according to offside rules? Does the Lord who sustains the cosmos take it offensively that you decided to give a yellow/red card for a handball or a tackle, and take it as you trying to compete with Him in His sovereignty?!
One finds that it generally seems to be the people most ignorant of covenantal law and legal philosophy that speak on it. Simply reasoning through it at the level of a ten year old, are the rules of games created by humans for mundane activities synonymous with constitutional laws and legal mechanisms that organise a society and seek sustained human prosperity the same? No intelligent person would say so, in fact the idea is so bizarre that I find it surreal to even be having this conversation. The same goes for considering fairytales (like Harry Potter) polytheism. IF this is the level of conversation and debate that inspires a social group’s attention, then that group has hit rock-bottom.
The main reason I’m addressing this, for those aware of the latest nonsense to command many people’s attention is because we seem to be re-entering the cycle of absolute nonsense that comes around every 5-7 years to animate the imagination of another generation with the illiterate baggage of the last, ensuring another cohort of young people will pursue what’s erroneous, useless and irrelevant. Every few years we’re subjected to silliest ideas, but the young who have no literacy are animated with mistruths, misrepresentations, glorified translators or uninformed actors.
Of course there’s a discussion to be had about what goes for deviance and how it’s defined. But to the main point, there are many corrupting or bizarrely erroneous ideas out there and we couldn’t possibly speak to all that diverge from productiveness because our lives would then be busied with stupidity and little else. So how do I decide what to comment on? I look at their social ramifications. For example, there are many ideas that I hold to be stoutly wrong, but I don’t comment on them because they don’t seem to cause social harm. Most people don’t take those ideas seriously and tend to interact with such ideas more as entertainment than actual expressions of God’s will. Similarly, for the few people that have irrelevant misgivings that prevent them from a connection and faithfulness to God, it tends to help them get over it for the greater good. Elsewhere, regular childish in-fighting between two sects also concern me very little – kids will be kids and as long they’re busying themselves with mundane foolishness, we’ll leave them to it and carry on like adults.
However, over two decades of my adult life, I’ve witnessed a few things that have had a deleterious effect on the progression of British believers, and absolutely irrelevant to their context, amongst them, orientalist-appropriated depictions of caliphates. Generations of young folk have not only neglected true righteousness to debate things irrelevant to their lives and environment (and of course from a point of utmost ignorance), mischaracterisations around concepts like these have led to murder and mayhem around the world, not to mention the negative political situation of Muslims in the UK (and elsewhere in the West). For example, certain conceptions of a caliphate and the ideology hākimiyyah inspired members of the group Al-Muhajirun to the killing of co-citizens, support for ISIS, and an outlook that confuses political priorities, meaning that they caused more problems than they solved. In practical terms, nothing has proved worst (in terms of outcomes) than the misrepresentation of these two concepts. The truth is that the laity have no business thinking they get political philosophy enough to hold stout opinions on the matter, just as we non-medics have no business thinking we get medicine enough to hold any opinion on cardiology.
But is it that big a deal? Yes, which the past couple of decades have shown. Let me give a brief illustration of how the steps of simplistic reasoning goes, leading to evil:
- Football with “man-made” rules is polytheism
- Thus playing football according to those rules is polytheism, and those who play football are polytheists
- If a Muslim plays football he becomes a polytheist and hence an apostate.
- This last stage is ultimately where extremists end up: In some Muslim imagination, death is the punishment for apostates, and so extremists will inevitably open that the lives of Muslims playing in the park aren’t sacrosanct.
Now, as simplistic and absurd as such reasoning is, with every premise of the seemingly deductive argument flawed – and at every stage, it seems to work for for a very small few and it’s the way crazies out there are encouraged to commit heinous crimes. And add to such idiocy the zeal of young people, emotive arguments about the Islamic lands being ‘invaded’ with only fighting to establish a caliph helping, you have the recipe for disastrous consequences. Lives ruined and lost.
The vast majority of those who’d accept such views tend to come from socio-economic deprived backgrounds where life outcomes are relatively low. I’m told by a friend (who’s an imam and teacher) that the individuals who assert that football is polytheism attract a following of young people from deprived areas of London. While the inane reasoning on football above might be comedic, in seriousness it is demonic, inspired by the devil to corrupt young people into believing they’re faithful and serving God’s cause. Parents ought to be aware of such threats to the cultivation of their children, and of course young people need to be educated appropriately. Break the cycle that seems to afflict generation after generation, in cities and towns across the country. We must create an environment where ignorance and corruptive ideas become persona non grata.
