Source: Politics
The World Cup quarter-final against France folds every saga about Moroccan defender and captain Achraf Hakimi into a single frame.
France is the team that ended Morocco’s historic 2022 run, the country where Hakimi became a global star at Paris Saint-Germain — and the legal system now charging him with rape over a 2023 allegation.
Hakimi denies any wrongdoing. But if convicted, he could face up to 15 years in prison. A quarter-final loss Thursday would raise the possibility that this becomes Hakimi’s last World Cup game and that Moroccan football loses one of its clearest throughlines from its 2022 breakthrough as a global football power to its role as a 2030 World Cup co-host.
A global vessel for Arab, African and Muslim pride in the last World Cup in Qatar, Hakimi soon emerged as a different kind of icon elsewhere: In 2023, amid his divorce in Spain, online manosphere circles obsessively embraced an unverified rumor that he shielded assets from his wife by placing them in his mother’s name. Lauded by figures including controversial online influencer Andrew Tate, Hakimi was cast as a masculine legend imagined to have outsmarted a woman in a rigged gendered battle. This lore has been resurfacing the past three weeks, since a French court ruled Hakimi would stand trial for the rape charge.
While Hakimi’s exploits clash for some fans, they are congruent enough for others. Within Muslim manosphere circles, there is no contradiction between Hakimi the superstar and Hakimi the defendant.
Western manosphere ideologies frame men as individuals dispossessed by the state and by women who have gained too much power, with divorce law, false allegations, dating culture and economic independence among major fixations.
In specific Muslim contexts, manosphere beliefs echo similar gripes but center them around a restored family unit and the sharper absolutism that gender roles have strayed from divinely sanctioned hierarchy. More than a simple misogyny flanked by cherry-picked Quranic verses, it is a politics of anti-liberal gender views, minority resentment and secular distrust.
French courts strike a particular nerve: State secularism promises neutrality toward religion, but many deem that neutrality a guise to police Muslim communities and their racial minorities. Hakimi will be adjudicated in what some defenders consider an inherently hostile judicial order — one shaped by modern Western feminism and refracted through older tropes of the “dangerous Muslim man” in Europe, where biases pull on centuries of migration, empire and civilizational suspicion.
The cultural politics of Hakimi’s case extend beyond the star athlete. Patriarchal interpretations of Islam can mobilize new support for right-wing parties in Western democracies, even amid otherwise exclusionary stances. And Muslim women are left with a pointed dilemma: Naming gender violence within their communities can be read as feeding anti-Muslim sentiment, while not naming it feeds the silence that insulates perpetrators.
That tension between gender and religion, defense and accountability, surrounds the Hakimi case during this unresolved period. The verdict isn’t likely to lead to a resolution that satisfies all — acquittal will look to many as if his status protected him, and conviction will suggest to others that no status would ever be enough to earn fair treatment.
Read MorePolitics, World Cup