Kura

Dedicated to a teen who absolutely loves the game… and to someone who demands shorter posts to read…

By: Bint Khalid

Kurat al qadam, mostly known as Kura, which is ‘ball’ in Arabic, or  sokker, or futbol, or voetbal, or soccer, or football… despite the slightly different words and alphabets used to describe a sport, everyone knows this abbreviation: FIFA.

The World Cup. Although not a fanatic myself, I cannot help being caught up in the electric atmosphere that comes only once every four summers.

Congregated around a rectangular portal televising a clashing match between two competitive squads each in their own colors and regalia, the intensity permeates through invisible flickering frames of satellite television as all eyes are fixed on an anticipated confrontation. The cheers and screams of possessed and painted fans in the background only heighten the captivation in your living room, and the fervor of the vuvuzelas, like those past trumpets of war. Rain or shine, the game must go on.

If you  ignore my embellished picture, and reach back into history, you will pull a chain of instances where this seemingly simple show of athletics has boasted the ability to overcome ingrained sentiments of hatred and bring conflicting peoples together over and over again.

It seems only symbolic that South Africa is hosting the event for 2010; a region that has been racially segregated since colonial times, officially so during the apartheid era, and is probably still touched by its remnants today. Nevertheless, the game has made history in South Africa beginning in the late ‘60s on Robben Island where political prisoners were able to form their very own league going on to become pivotal forces behind today’s multi-racial democracy. If you follow the events relayed in Nicholas Griffin’s article “How Soccer Defeated Apartheid” you will see how this game was able to rise above a time when ‘segregate everything’ was the motto, defying apartheid and bringing folk a step closer together. This is but one example of the sport’s healing might.

The World Cup is a mania that sweeps the globe, and those 90 minutes subconsciously stab through all discrepancies in the multitude of minds, bringing all witnesses to their knees in reverence of this game.  A game that transcends age, race, class, religion, language, and geography, so that you are only left holding the highest respect for it. The only sense of us and them is indentified by what color of t-shirt you are rooting for.

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 Related: How Soccer Defeated Apartheid, by Nicholas Griffin.