Mohamed Salah

Source: Bigstock

The Premier League football (as in “soccer”) season has just ended, with the title of champions of England 2024/25 going to the team I support, Liverpool FC, whose star Egyptian forward-cum-winger, Mohamed Salah, has also ended up with the Golden Boot award for the competition’s top scorer.

As you might be able to tell from his name, Mohamed is a Muslim—and the fact that he bends down on the pitch in the classic bum-in-air, head-on-floor, sujood pose of praise toward Allah every time he scores would be an even greater giveaway. His surname “Salah” even means “prayer” in Arabic. Likewise, one of his daughters is named “Makka,” after “Mecca,” albeit most Liverpool fans probably think it’s after Steve McManaman.

Ours being an innately propagandistic and officially Islamophilic age, due to all of the above, Salah has naturally been acclaimed as an admirable “ambassador for Islam” across the U.K., whether he wants to be or not, in a way a white English footballer named Christian Worship playing in the Saudi Pro League probably would not.

Dodgy Reasoning
Superb in the first half of the season, once Ramadan arrived, Mo’s goals output began to slump noticeably, something some brave commentators suggested might be linked to him being religiously obliged to fast, starving individuals rarely making the best sportsmen (although the Ethiopians do okay at long-distance running—particularly if they can smell food cooking in the distance).

“Ours being an innately propagandistic and officially Islamophilic age, Salah has naturally been acclaimed as an admirable ‘ambassador for Islam’ across the U.K.”

Such dissent from the general Islamophilic narrative surrounding Salah is rare, however, with adoring Liverpool fans developing several Koran-tastic terrace chants for their hero, calling him (to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine”) “Mohamed Salah/A gift from Allah.” More elaborate is the following doggerel, modeled after the catchy summer hit “Good Enough” by 1990s Britpop band Dodgy:

If he’s good enough for me, he’s good enough for you,
If he scores another goal, I’ll be a Muslim too!
If he’s good enough for you, he’s good enough for me,
He’s sitting in the mosque, that’s where I wanna be.

This sounds like mere terrace humor…until you read a ridiculous story from The Guardian headlined “How Mohamed Salah inspired me to become a Muslim,” reading that inspired me to give up all faith in the existence of any God whatsoever, Islamic or otherwise. The piece tells the tale of footie fan Ben Bird, who once possessed “a hatred of Muslims,” thinking they were all “evil people who carried swords” and being completely ignorant about the faith. Naturally, Bird then chose to do a degree in Middle Eastern studies; perhaps he was so ignorant, he didn’t realize any Muslims lived there.

Bird’s course was at the University of Leeds, where the phrase “to study Muslims” simply means to go outside, so his cluelessness was soon cured; the local tea towels carried no swords, simply the Word of Allah. But what really turned Bird fully toward Mecca was his choice of dissertation topic. Stumped for what to discuss—Sunni vs. Shia? The Islamic Golden Age? The Palestine question?—Bird’s “dyslexia tutor” suggested, “What about the Mohamed Salah song?”

That’s the profound standard of knowledge that is now studied at British universities: terrace football chants. It won’t be long before someone comes out with an entire PhD thesis titled “You’re Shit and You Know You Are: Comparative Epistemologies of Decline Between the Ottoman Empire, 1845–1918, and Fenerbahce’s Disastrous Turkish SüperLig 10th-Place Finish Season of 1980/81.”

Writing his dissertation, Bird realized that “Mohamed Salah was the first Muslim I could [ever] relate to,” something that ultimately led him toward conversion. Has there ever been a more trivial reason for a man finding religion? Bird didn’t even support Liverpool, but Nottingham Forest!

Pharaoh Foul?
Some rival fans, of course, prefer to derisively chant, “Salah is a bomber” at the Egyptian King as he bombs down the wing before unleashing yet another high-explosive shot using the Semtex in his boots. Others, more sycophantic, pump out rather overoptimistic tweets saying things like “Mo Salah [is] doing more to end the clash of civilizations than anyone else in the world” and “Mo Salah is gonna stop Islamophobia.” I wouldn’t mind, but that first tweeter was Samuel P. Huntington.

A 2021 scientific study even purported to demonstrate that Liverpool’s 2017 signing of Salah correlated with—and thus supposedly caused—an 18.9 percent drop in hate crimes in the surrounding Merseyside region, whilst the team’s fans roughly halved the number of anti-Islamic tweets they made following Mo’s appearances on the pitch.

Surveys further showed Salah’s performances boosted the belief of Liverpudlians that Islam was inherently compatible with British values and culture; the fact that the next big Islamist bombing incident on the British mainland took place in Liverpool’s archrival footballing city of Manchester probably only helped reinforce this idea.

The extrapolated logic was simple: If every big-city Premier League team has a brilliant Muslim player on it, all anti-Muslim prejudice across England will vanish, and the nation will voluntarily sign itself up to become but a province of the neo-caliphate immediately. You’d think Europe’s many Muslims might be pleased by that…but no. Some of them just never are.

Christmas Tree Formation
One of the chief non-sporting reasons Salah has been taken to Liverpudlian hearts is that he is a genial individual who does not go around constantly trying to convert the white natives. Instead he tries to fit in, one example being that, every festive season, he publishes friendly photos of himself and his family celebrating beneath a Christmas tree—before, equally traditionally, large numbers of Muslims send him mountains of electronic abuse for doing so.

Angry messages about his “shame pose” like “Delete this right now,” “We Muslim people look up to you and you do this in return,” and “Mark my words, you won’t score any goal till end of the season, for disrespecting our beloved prophet,” rather suggest that, whilst Salah’s presence on Merseyside may indeed have helped reduce anti-Muslim hatred from whites, it may have helped increase antiwhite hatred from Muslims in an equal ratio.

The way Mohamed’s name is often shortened simply to “Mo” may be taken by most as a sign of affection—but not to the mindset of the professional Muslim malcontent, one of whom, freelance journalist Timo “Don’t call me Tim!” Al-Farooq, condemns it as only a “liberal white supremacist exercise in forced assimilation and de-Arabization.” This is Timbo’s honest opinion of fans’ only ostensibly complimentary chant about Mo-Mo, which is nothing but insincere “performative Islamophilia”:

Mohamed Salah’s influence on Western perceptions of Islam is entirely subject to the capricious whims of the white (all too often drunken) football fan, not exactly the kind of person one would want to tie one’s fortunes to or be at the mercy of…. At least the Salah song was honest about the conditionality of its Islamophilia, just take a look at the lyrics again:

“If he’s good enough for me, he’s good enough for you,
If he scores another goal, I’ll be a Muslim too.”

Not when he scores a goal, if he scores a goal. Meaning: the Western Islamophile who wishes to convert to Islam will only do so as long as Salah keeps scoring, thus illustrating a fundamental lack of altruism behind his professed motivations and debunking the conditional and purely symbolic Islamophilia of the humorous Salah song as pure hokum, from which one should not derive societal trends.

Well, maybe we should indeed not draw too many wider socioreligious conclusions from trivial epiphenomena like jokey football chants. Given the nature of the previous highest-profile Muslim player to (dis)grace Liverpool’s Anfield Stadium, if the general public really did take all their cues toward the faith from exposure to its most prominent on-pitch proponents, then all of Merseyside’s mosques would have been burned to the ground by angry white mobs twenty years ago.

Spitting Mad
El-Hadji Diouf was a Senegalese Muslim who played in the same rough position Salah does today, a hideous, metal-mouthed Morlock who signed for Liverpool for £10M off the back of a few decent games at the 2002 World Cup before proceeding to spend the next few seasons playing abysmally, spitting at people, and generally acting like an absolute bleach-haired shaytan.

Diouf ended up with six goals from eighty appearances, two of which came in his first league game for the club, one of the rare occasions when he looked as if he could actually be arsed to do anything. Where most professional footballers have entries on Wikipedia with headings like “Trophies Won” or “Career Statistics,” Diouf has one headed “Controversies,” which contains details like these:

On 13 March 2003…he spat at Celtic fans during a televised UEFA Cup quarter-final…. In November 2004 while on loan to Bolton, Diouf was charged by the police for spitting at an 11-year-old Middlesbrough fan during a 1–1 draw. Then, on 27 November 2004, Diouf spat in the face of Portsmouth player Arjan de Zeeuw…. On 20 September 2009, Diouf was questioned by police after allegations he had made a racial slur to a ball-boy during a match at Everton, telling him to “fuck off, white boy.” Diouf defended his actions by saying the ball-boy had thrown the ball to him “like a bone to a dog” and that Everton fans were racially abusing and throwing bananas at him. Police found no evidence of this.

As this suggests, whenever anyone criticized Diouf, they were automatically “racist.” In various biographies, genuine Liverpool legends Steven Gerrard (710 games, 186 goals, seven major trophies) and Jamie Carragher (737 games, seven major trophies) criticized Diouf as an arrogant dickhead, leading Diouf to reportedly respond by saying, “Gerrard has never liked black people.” Are you sure it wasn’t just one black person in particular? Worse, “Gerrard is jealous of me. He hasn’t achieved what I have done in football [i.e., nothing]. When I came to Liverpool, I came up with the status of boss.”

“Jamie Carragher, I hate him,” Diouf has since added. “I found him useless.” He found you useless too, El-Hadji. One online profile calls Diouf both “Liverpool’s Most Hated Ex-Player” and “a bell-end.” If Salah converts spectators to Islam, Diouf turned them immediately toward apostasy.

Glasgow Kisses
Yet, to be fair, just like Mo Salah, during a later stage in his career spent with Glasgow Rangers, El-Hadji Diouf did successfully demonstrate Islam’s innate compatibility with certain aspects of British life—by enthusiastically embracing sectarian hatred. Glasgow Rangers are traditionally Protestant, and their cross-city rivals Glasgow Celtic traditionally Catholic, making the two sets of supporters hate each other’s guts and repeatedly attempt to violently attack one another. This led Diouf to speak admiringly of the place thus:

Apart from that [once being sent a letter bomb, possibly by Jamie Carragher] I loved Glasgow. It was the pinnacle of footballing cities…. Glasgow is more than just football, it’s a war of religion…. At the first press conference, a journalist asked me, “You know that here, football is a religion?” I told him, “I am aware of this and from today I am a Muslim Protestant!”… When I left Glasgow, half of the city wanted to cut my head off!

I take it all back, he really had converted them all to Islam.

Life in Scotland did cause Diouf to reassess certain regrettable aspects of his previous poor conduct whilst in Liverpool, though: “Spitting [on people] is something I have [since] regretted…. Today I am more mature, I would punch rather than spit.”

You know when Mo Salah purportedly halted all those anti-Muslim hate-crime incidents in Liverpool, post-2017? Don’t you think it’s possible El-Hadji Diouf might have caused them all in the first place?