At this precarious moment geopolitically around the world, and particularly in the Middle East, sport might just help.

“Sports is a beautiful tool for common understanding,” says Nasser Majali, Secretary General of the Islamic Solidarity Sports Association.

“We view sports as an integration tool – as a peacebuilding tool, and one to build integration between countries and between people. It makes changes in culture, in gender equity and opens up a lot of doors for dialogue and travel.

“Sports is a language. In our membership there are three official languages, Arabic, English and French, and a lot of unofficial languages. But the one thing that brings them together, and they all can talk, is one single language of sports. Everybody knows who wins and loses, and what that person in front of me went through to get there. So it is a unifying language.”

Asked if sports is contributing to the westernisation of the Islamic world, Majali pointed to the power of sports for development in all cultures.

“Sports is a very important tool for development, whether it's in education and health, in economics. Ask any child today in the world about sports and 90% of the time they'll talk about sports as something very important in their life. Then when people grow up you will find that a lot of their memories and character development was built around that.”

Transformation phase

The Islamic Solidarity Sports Association (ISSA) was established about 40 years ago, with a membership based on the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, the umbrella organisation for Muslim countries – not just predominantly Muslim countries but also countries with sizeable Muslim populations like Guyana Uganda, Cameroon.

“The vision and mission of the organisation has been transformed,” says Majali. “It's going through a transformation phase for us to become to scale more and to go into development of sustainable sports ecosystems within the 57 countries.”

ISSA has five focus areas, starting with sports development. “So that's developmental programmes and also prioritising sports as a sector in the 57 countries. That goes also to the economic part of sports and the startups and companies’ growth. So it's a discussion that we have with our National Olympic Committees and then with the governments and leading bodies within the countries to try to push for the sports sector, which sadly, it's not prioritised in all countries.”

Another major focus area is multi-sports games and events. ISSA has its own Games – the Islamic Solidarity Games – and aims to help members to host other events between Games.

Research and academia is another area. “There are a lot of statistics missing from the 57 countries regarding the sports sector,” says Majali. “We believe it's our role to become the kind of the Wikipedia of the world of Islam and sports. The whole philosophy behind sports and Islam requires a lot of research.”

The fourth focus area is the integration of Islamic culture and tradition within the global sports movement. “So that’s kind of explaining a lot of things. What happens in Ramadan with athletes – why we shouldn't have mega sports events happening right in the middle of Ramadan and how would that affect performance? Also, topics related to the right of female athletes to be wearing the hijab in all sports sporting events. Somebody needs to be a voice, so we are taking on that responsibility.”

The last focus area is emergency assistance. Many of ISSA’s member countries are experiencing crises, from the conflicts in Sudan, Palestine to the recent earthquake in Turkey and floods in Libya and many others. “What is very important for us is to be able to mobilise, assist with programming, and lobbying for the sports sector in those countries so that it does not lose its priority when the rebuild starts.”

Working with partners

One of the main ways that ISSA is looking to implement its aims is by working with partners. “We don't want to reinvent the game. So when we come to talk about gender equity, we'd like to integrate with partners who have worked on that for a long time.

“If we wanted to talk about IFs, we'd like to find a partner or somebody like SportAccord to work with. If the International Olympic Committee is working on Olympic solidarity, we'd like to integrate into that, and with potential partners such as the UN or Save the Children for example.

“Our implementation methodology is to find the partner and scale with them rather than do something from scratch. I hope that that in the next couple of years is reflected in the programmes that we implement.”