To guarantee itself a prominent position in international football, the tiny Arabian Gulf state of Qatar has resorted to naturalizing foreign players. The reason is of course to compensate for the severe shortage of Qatari footballers.
Qatar is just an example, an introduction to a wider state of affairs typical of our Gulf region. It is a region that has traveled a considerable distance toward material development but which has failed to establish an emotional link between its achievement and the local population. The reason is simple: The individual in this region has never participated in the development by contributing time, effort and his or her own sweat.
We seem to lack that overwhelming feeling of pride that should link us to all these signs of development — houses, shopping centers, roads, hospitals, schools, universities. We lack the pride simply because we have not carried a single brick, let alone designed, planned or spent hours on the site to oversee the work from beginning to end.
Our relationship with these achievements can be likened to that of someone living in a rented house. In many cases, a tenant rents the house, stays for a time and then leaves. It is a temporary relationship and often lacks depth and attachment.
When you go into any of our universities where thousands have studied, you will find that not a single national ever put on a safety hat and took part in the construction of the institution. You may wonder why so much damage is done to public buildings; the answer is because those who work in them have no sense of attachment to them. They never went inside until the day they began to work there; they were not involved in the actual building and so have no sense of what it all means and how it was done.
Maybe that is why too many of us lead lives similar to tourists staying temporarily in a luxury hotel. We suffer under the illusion that a fat wallet will allow us to move to another luxury hotel whenever we begin to feel bored. We don’t respect the street because we had nothing to do with its construction; we don’t care about keeping our cities clean because we know that a foreign worker will clean everything up.
It is truly tragic when such feelings of indifference extend to recreational activities, including sport. We find ourselves belonging to a group of fans who cheer the national team raising their country’s flag without knowing that the players they are cheering know nothing of their folk songs, their traditions, their language or even what the flag itself means.
