ABSTRACT
The present analysis highlights the extent to which the boys and young men not only talk “tough” to bolster their sense of tarnished masculinities, but also turn to football to engender (read: make real, visible, explicit) “tough talk” etiquettes of their valued masculinities on and off the football pitch. These processes are theorised as a ‘muscular Islam’, which begins for some as a philosophy of dissent against rising Islamophobia and contentions of crises around Muslim males. This is itself underpinned by an assertive identity politics that is both relational in context and responsive to global and local discourses pertaining to a ‘moral panic’. On the football pitch, it is further envisioned as an embodied (individualised) resistance whereby young Muslim males mobilise their physical and social bodies to thwart stereotypes and infi ltrate the polemics of public and political discourses that deny such men integrity and dignity. At a time when Muslims are staunchly placed at the forefront of public and political debates about religious extremism, such discussions may provide the means from which
to ‘probe further’ (Werbner 2002: 270) in order to understand ‘subaltern (identity) politics’ (Birt 2009: 219). Overall the chapter delineates how collective expressions of resistance or opposition are simultaneously infl uenced by the socio-cultural and political specifi cities within which one lives.
