On the Mohamed Aboutrika We Do Not Know… Your Guide to Making a Beloved Date-Paste Idol!

Many questions and few answers, successive episodes of a series whose ending is known in advance: where will Emam Ashour go? Zamalek social media is turned upside down, and the wheel turns as life turns, in one direction: a player shines with his old club, Zamalek, then suddenly decides to try playing abroad, shines with an institutional club like Denmark’s Midtjylland, only to return home again empty-handed. What explains this?

It happened before, in the same way and for the same motives, and the timeline tells us Al Ahly had indeed knocked on the doors, especially as the offer included not only a huge sum of money but something more important: the legendary number 22 will be yours, you will thus become the fans’ idol, and the treasures of the earth will open before you, in blessed memory of the owner of the golden foot, Saint Mohamed Mohamed Aboutrika. An offer that cannot be refused, can it?!

What was surprising here were the fans’ comments: one said this number would be a reason for guiding the player to the straight path, another stressed that it would intercede for him on the Day of Judgement, and a man of full legal capacity, living in a developing Third World country, appeared to assert himself that the Day of Judgement would come in protest at this act, for since when are humans compared to saints?

The Saint

“I walk with a saint’s heart, even if they consider me a heretic… no, a saint too, and when I love a woman I turn her into… wait, I will not look at her face, and this is the secret of attraction.” Have you ever seen the picture of Aboutrika with his eyes lowered to the ground in front of a presenter in a revealing dress? Of course you have, and automatically you found yourself thanking God that the world is still fine and that there are people holding on to their religion like those holding on to embers, because, as you know, we are at the end of time, and corruption has appeared on land and sea, and so on with the popular variations Egyptians embrace and repeat.

That incident was not the only one founding the player’s relationship with his fans attached to their religion; it was preceded and followed by many incidents through which he presented a distinctive image of Islam and Muslims, from the rise of the “Team of the Prostrators” to the many large charitable works he does in secret, which only came to light through witnesses’ testimonies.

The Egyptian national team had a clear religious character, and despite the presence of many players who were not religiously committed in the general sense, such as Amr Zaki and Ahmed Hossam Mido, outward religiosity remained present among all of them: they celebrated only by prostrating and raised only copies of the Quran, and of course Aboutrika was the main source of this inspiration, as he was their imam in the five daily prayers and the most committed and closest to the Islamic religion among them.

Those incidents and sayings were important in the player’s relationship with all segments of the people, especially after they went beyond the idea of the talented player and championed the big, influential causes in the Arab world. Do you remember the phrase “Sympathize with Gaza”, which he showed to the cameras at the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations? It was the talk of the Arab street and has remained, to this day, a foundation of the man’s legend.

The Divine Comedy

Aboutrika has a comic streak that some do not like, and this is not our opinion of course; it is shared by his former teammate Mohamed Barakat, who stated before that Aboutrika used to deliberately tell jokes so that he alone could laugh at them… haha. That is not the real problem, because the man was not bothered by those remarks and kept laughing at them cheerfully and shyly; indeed, he has not had a single personal feud since he rose as a star on the football scene, and perhaps since his early childhood.

In 2012, Trika was a candidate for the post of football director at Al Ahly, which was warmly welcomed by the fans and met with great anger by the media. Why? Because he officially announced his support for Mohamed Morsi’s candidacy in the presidential election, thus being counted as part of the political Islam current, and here was the straw that broke the camel’s back! Systematic media campaigns began, accusing him of involvement in financing terrorist operations, to the point that Mostafa Younis, a former Al Ahly player, announced that the club’s training camps would automatically move to Sinai among the terrorist groups as soon as he took the sporting director’s chair, along with many, many accusations of high treason and attacks on his honour, lineage and dignity. What was his reaction? Exactly as you expected:

That astonishing mixture of talent, self-denial, a clean face and a pure heart on the one hand, and the harsh and fierce attacks he was subjected to in recent years by the media on the other, paved the way for the emergence of a current that submits completely to the man’s nonsense, especially after long years of separation, so that everything Aboutrika does is believed by the fans; even the jokes he tells idly have come to make the fans laugh against their will, for no reason other than that they come from the saint’s mouth. This state needs no proof; it is enough to follow any social media page recently, especially after the campaign the man waged against Chelsea, heaping accusations of failure on the management, the coach and the players from the second round until now, to find the comments centred on a single goal: no one may approach this man, whatever the reasons.

Man Is the Enemy of What He Does Not Know

After leaving for Qatar, the saint found the doors of the “beIN Sports” channels wide open to him, to work as a sports analyst in the channel’s English Premier League studios. Here we must clarify something: there is not a single person on the face of the earth who can, alone, analyse the tactical plan of a full football match immediately after it ends, because it is a complex process involving many, many variables, mechanisms and situations, requiring whole days to study every shot of different and branching play situations; therefore, analysis studios have no meaning in the first place. Sorry… we mean their existence is limited only to providing the space needed for advertisements, and through that process we can pass some quarrels between stars at opposite ends to increase viewership.

So Trika is like other former players who fill the screens for capitalist purposes without relying on real knowledge; but a report published by “Goal” in 2020, monitoring some analysts’ salaries, may scatter some papers completely: for example, Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher at “Sky Sports” receive nearly one million pounds a year, while “Gary Lineker” at the “BBC” receives 1.35 million pounds and “Alan Shearer” 395,000 pounds, while Trika receives a salary estimated at EUR 600,000 a year.

Astronomical figures put an important question to us: if these people receive such salaries, why do they not take things seriously, even a little? We know the matter is extremely difficult, but at least why do they not look at things more rationally? Or, more precisely, why did Mohamed Aboutrika insist on his sarcastic criticism of Chelsea’s performance after only three rounds? And why does he insist on calling it the “billion-dollar” team without looking at the other factors and variables? Does he need us to tell him that teams are built with patience, especially with a new coach and different playing styles? And if that is the case, why does he insist on denying it was a misjudgement after everyone advised him to stop?

And of course we do not forget his constant flirting with “mainstream” currents and his constant incitement against homosexuals, considering homosexuality “a dangerous and insolent phenomenon” and “contrary to human nature”, without relying on specialist opinions in medicine or in Sharia, which feeds that hatred in young people’s minds.

This statement has only one meaning: that the whole game is not worth this trouble or this fuss, which also means those working in the game do not deserve this amount of money in return. Here another question may arise: since when does the saint insert himself into conflicts of this kind? Well, we will save you the answer: from now on, because of what we have planted in his imagination over the years, by our own hand and not by Amr’s.

Have you heard of the term “celebrity worship” before? In a study published in 2021, Professor “Sandeep Vohra”, a physiological psychologist, says that admiring celebrities is normal at a young age, when a child or teenager begins to glorify a particular person with a legendary character in his field of work, and this person is often attached to us and our motives, as we are constantly exposed to him through the media and social media; but as we grow older, we usually tend to forget this person.

But in some cases the matter may turn into an obsession affecting your personal, professional and social life, reaching a point where you constantly search for this person online, follow him on social media, and your life begins to revolve around him to the extent that you forget yourself and drown in that man’s ideas and nonsense. Hence the term worship, which does not mean you worship him literally, but he gradually becomes the sole and only standard for your thoughts, opinions and movements, especially if he directly suffers from the same grievances as you or carries the same cause on his shoulders.

This is exactly what happened in this case: after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and the continuing feats of the resistance, Aboutrika returned to the forefront again as a first defender of the first just cause, and went back to his old habits, presenting himself as an ordinary man like us, who worked in a brick factory as a child and suffered greatly to reach a prestigious position, and when he got there he did not forget his family and those who love him. This made us fall into that sequence with him: we love him madly and believe exactly what he believes, forgetting that those actions may change his nature personally, making him someone else we do not know, a person who feels entitled and does not try to develop his opinion one iota. It is as if we created for ourselves a god of date paste, and instead of eating it in the evening, we preferred that it eat us in the morning with its statements and laughter, hoping we might find a statement on a just cause that represents us, wiping out the bitterness before it and reviving his popularity once again in minds and hearts.

Opinion articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Zawia3.