ABSTRACT
This chapter situates the experiences of Afghan and Pakistani male athletes within a post-secular moral economy in which Islamic ethical principles, postcolonial structures, and global hierarchies of gendered power converge. South Asian Muslim masculinity in sport is historically organized around a generative paradox to embody both religious piety and dominant ideals of power. Athletes who inhabit this dual horizon are expected to perform competitively and submissively simultaneously. This tension constitutes a dynamic field of negotiation through which new forms of Muslim masculine subjectivity can be explained with two linked concepts. Authentic Piety names the embodied ways Muslim athletes materialize faith within competitive, often secular arenas, through practices like fasting, prayer, and ethical refusals that bind discipline to devotion. Islamic Embodied Sovereignty captures how those same bodies assert moral self-rule under regimes that would commodify, secularize, or erase religious subjectivity. These concepts explain Pakistan’s largely state-institutionalized piety and Afghanistan’s resilient, defensive piety under coercion, while also tracking how athletes negotiate Western Islamophobia, intra-community moral policing, and the profit-driven nature of global sport. The result is neither surrender to hegemonic masculinity nor retreat into private devotion but an emergent ethical masculinity grounded in accountability before Allah.
