You reach a point where all you have is a handful of broken bricks and there is nothing left to eat, drink, sell, steal, barter, or fight over, except sand, dust and graves. Somalis had finally fallen far enough that even the prospect of hard core Islamic Fundamentalism seemed better than the status quo.
I don’t think it is the best choice, but at least it is a choice. However, those who run the Joint Islamic Courts in Mogadishu have made a terrible mistake. The Joint Islamic Courts are the quasi-judicial, flying squads who roam around beating up those who are not wearing veils correctly, drinking alcohol, or not carrying the Koran with the right degree of dignity.
The JIC’s mistake is to shut down any theatre or café that is showing the World Cup broadcasts, as it is against the will of God. The rationale is that there are unveiled woman visible and there are ads for booze, beer and material goods that are not acceptable to the Islamic Courts, therefore Somalis might be tempted to turn the clock forward to at least 1964, from the eleventh century.
For those who don’t know, soccer, as we call it, or football as the rest of the world calls it, is insanely popular. Every four years, the other ninety percent of the planet outside North America goes wild with the World Cup for a month. Imagine the Super Bowl, Grey Cup, Stanley Cup, World Series, Indy 500, Daytona 500 Giller Prize and the Scripps-Howard Spelling Bee, all rolled into one month long celebration culminating in one final game.
The equipment, at most, consists of a pair of shorts, a shirt, a pair of shoes and socks, a jock strap and a ball. Which also explains why football is popular in every country from the first world to the fifth world. Any two kids can play it as long as they have something to kick around that isn’t a large rock and enough space to do it between crops, water buffalo or land mines.
Fans, worldwide, get rabies shots at World Cup time. Works stops. Neighbours pool what little money they have to obtain, ideally, a satellite dish and a TV, or they share winding duties on a hand-cranked radio to get some kind of, any kind of coverage of World Cup games.
So Somalia, at long last pulling itself up by its merest remaining fingernail out of more than a decade of utter devastation and hideous violence, is having its very last pleasure, the World Cup, taken away by the narrow-minded doctrinaire Islamic Police.
I’m fairly certain that Allah/God/Jehovah/Yaweh likes a good bit of recreational sport. I have it on reliable account that the Supreme Being would even place the occasional wager, if he/she/it could find a bookie dumb enough to take the spread from the All Seeing-All Knowing-Creator of All Things. An Italy-Brazil final. Brazil by one. You heard it here first, right from God to RoadDave. And a red card to the Joint Islamic Court in Mogadishu.
RoadDave 