ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, Malek Bennabi described the reasons behind the crisis of the Arab and Islamic world in the following terms: '… instead of constructing a civilisation, we have sought to accumulate its products … the outcome of Islamic renaissance has not, during the last fifty years, been a construction but rather an accumulation of materials' (Bennabi 1970: translation by the authors). The implication of Bennabi's words which are still applicable more than three decades later is that the real crisis in the contemporary Arab and Muslim world is not one of the material means but is first and foremost a crisis of ideas and concepts. The implication of this realisation is that there should be a recognition of a need today in the Arab and Muslim world to deconstruct and demystify the over-politicised and ideological discourses about all domains of society: sport, literature, cinema, music, religion, education, history, etc. In order to achieve this, a culture of dialogue and a culture of accepting differences of opinion need to be established. An aim of the study reported here, therefore, is to open a debate, by giving voice to a number of parties (politicians representing different political tendencies or projects for society, academics and sport administrators) to question and to express their views about a concept or a domain, which has been neglected in the academic field, that is, the place of sport in Arabo-Muslim, and specifically in Algerian, society. The study thus focuses on the discursive construction of policy in the range of language/value communities identified, constituting a (relatively rare) example of a Type IV approach to comparative policy analysis, 'defining discourse'.
