Playing and displaying record-breaking greatness in the English League — the most-watched league in the history of football — to the delight of his fans the world over, Salah has probaly entered into realms uncharted by any other Egyptian in modern history. During a more-than-impressive first season at Liverpool, Mohammed Salah scored 32 goals to break the 10-year-old English Premier League’s single-season scoring record held by Cristiano Ronaldo, and cement legendary status in Britain. In post-Brexit Britain with all the contentious immigration debates, here is an observant Muslim who prostrates himself after goals, yet is embraced by the British fans and lovers of the round leather game who hail him, “the King of Egypt.”
Back home in Egypt, Salah is already a living legend. Before last season’s success in England, he bore his country on his shoulder over a 13 month period, leading them to World Cup after a 28-year hiatus. Interestingly, he has never had the privilege of watching his country live at a World as he wasn’t even born the last time Egypt featured at the global showpiece. This feat and more have led to comparisons with Umm Kulthum, renowned female singer and Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel Prize-winning novelist and brought reprieve to a nation which, over the last few years, wallowed in a tumultuous uprising, violence, a military coup, and was a country slowly creeping into military autocracy.
Success at home and abroad has made Salah a hero on two continents. People come from all over the world to see Egypt’s ancient civilization. But Salah fills the gap of sparse modern successes. So when “tragedy” struck on May 28 during the UEFA Champion League final when a tackle resulted in a dislocated shoulder, it felt like 9/11 all over again in Egypt and, indeed, across the World. For the man who literaily carries the nation on his shoulders, his shoulder became an issue of international discourse.
Like a cat with nine lives, he recovered and is already causing quite a buzz on arrival at the World Cup in Russia. Chechen strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, accused by human-rights organizations of a wide range of abuses, basked in the glow of Salah by driving to his hotel personally to retrieve the star.
He didn’t get to play any part in the first game, and it showed as Egypt fell to a late Uruguayan header. But when Salah eventually takes the field in Russia, the world will not just be watching a supremely gifted striker; the world will behold a national symbol, carrying a battered nation on his battered shoulders once again, and more instructively, a player who has become a global unifying force.