The Historical Defeat of Allah: From the "Eleven of Prostrators" to Hezbollah and Vilayat-e Faqih (article)

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The Historical Defeat of Allah: From the "Eleven of Prostrators" to Hezbollah and Vilayat-e Faqih

The history of human thought is intimately bound to perpetual attempts to introduce the unseen into the details of daily life, transforming metaphysics into an tool for managing material conflicts, whether these occur on political and military battlegrounds or on the green grass of football stadiums. This propensity to politicize religion and make the deity a stakeholder in earthly power equations constitutes a structural phenomenon deeply rooted in the collective psyche of many contemporary societies, particularly within the Arab and Islamic world. This phenomenon manifests as a fierce desire to monopolize spiritual legitimacy and claim to speak on behalf of heaven, thereby redefining the "self" as the army or group of God, while the "other"—the rival or adversary—is relegated to the category of impiety or demonization. However, this moral and spiritual monopoly soon clashes with the neutrality of cosmic laws and material rules that govern human reality. Physics favors no one based on doctrinal identity, and battles, like matches, are decided by effort, technology, and rigorous planning, not by empathetic rhetoric or prayer. When a stinging material defeat occurs, it is not merely a military setback or a sporting loss; it transforms, within a consciousness in crisis, into an existential shock perceived, according to this flawed justificatory logic, as a historical defeat of the spiritual representations that were forced into the furnace of earthly material competition.

This continuous series of illusions begins at levels that seem simple, almost playful, but carry the same cognitive mechanisms that drive major political projects. Designating the Egyptian national football team as the "Eleven of Prostrators" during the first decade of the twenty-first century was not a mere passing label or a marketing media brand. It was a condensed expression of the saturation of bigotry and religious reactionism within the cultural and social structure. The collective prostration of players after every goal transformed into a ritual attempting to snatch a sacred character for a modern popular game. Along with it, a media narrative was born, propagating the idea that sporting victory is a direct divine reward for faith and piety. This discourse amplified to the point of suggesting that heaven intervened to redirect the ball's trajectory into the net in response to the supplications of the faithful during dawn prayers. This was clearly manifested in the excessive media hype that followed the ephemeral victory over the New Zealand team in the World Cup, where the event was depicted as an invisible miracle and a historical victory reflecting the superiority of the believing self. However, this fragile edifice of religious propaganda quickly collapsed at the first real, material test on the pitch when that same team lost to Argentina by three goals to two. From then on, the collective mentality found itself incapable of explaining how a team representing the prostrators could be beaten by a team led by Messi, around whom popular imagination weaves tales of support for hostile entities. A sporting defeat on the green rectangle exposes the deception of these representations, because football is a purely human game, born in the nineteenth century and governed by the norms of modern science. It does not recognize doctrinal identities but rather physical conditioning, tactics, and the professionalism of organizational structures. Introducing God into it engenders laughable logical contradictions that make material loss appear as a failure of the metaphysical narrative behind which people had taken refuge.

This phenomenon does not stop at stadium borders; it extends to form the hard core of political and military projects adopted by movements of political Islam across all confessions and doctrines. This structural correlation is evident in the rise of the Vilayat-e Faqih current in Iran and the model presented by its armed wing in Lebanon, represented by the Hezbollah organization. The choice of this specific name was not a linguistic coincidence, but an operation of total appropriation and monopoly of the metaphysical concept, with the faction proclaiming itself the exclusive and sole representative of divine will on earth. Through this ideological logic, political battles and military wars are transformed: from material conflicts between human forces for land, influence, and geopolitical interests, they become absolute cosmic wars between the camp of God and the camp of Satan. This spiritual arrogance confers immense mobilization energy upon ideological movements at the outset, allowing them to justify heavy sacrifices and transcend human inadequacies by making partisans believe that victory is inevitable because heaven fights by their side. Nevertheless, this overuse of the sacred places these organizations in a destructive cognitive gulf when they hit the wall of international power dynamics and the technological and military superiority of their adversaries, such as the United States and Israel, who are qualified in rhetorical discourse as big and small devils. When they receive fatal blows leading to the destruction of their infrastructure or the liquidation of their historical leaders, defeat is no longer summarized as a simple military retreat manageable through alternative plans. It becomes an existential earthquake striking at the heart of their public's political doctrine, because it shatters the illusion of divine delegation and reveals that smart bombs, drones, and intelligence superiority cannot be confronted with metaphysical slogans, thus making defeat appear as a collapse of the mythical concept upon which the entire wager rested.

The phenomenon of the "Eleven of Prostrators" and that of Hezbollah share a single psychological mechanism called compensatory regression in social psychology. This refers to the resort of groups in crisis to the unseen to escape the demands and challenges of material reality. Societies suffering from a civilizational, economic, or political decline live in a state of cognitive schizophrenia: on one hand, they witness the material and scientific superiority of the other, and on the other hand, they possess a cultural heritage dictating that they are doctrinally the best and the highest. To resolve this glaring contradiction, they resort to amplifying religious manifestations and intruding them into all earthly affairs as a sort of compensation for the absence of real achievement. Victory in a football match becomes proof of divine satisfaction, and uncalculated military adventures transform into a sacred jihad where heaven guarantees victory. Yet, the structural problem of this mode of thinking lies in the neutrality of cosmic laws, which favor no one based on feelings or spiritual intentions. The laws governing the movement of projectiles and missiles in wars are the same laws governing the movement of a ball on the pitch; they are purely material physical laws. In the absence of technical, scientific, and institutional preparation, when bigotry substitutes for planning, defeat becomes biologically and historically inevitable. The irony lies here in the fact that the traditional religious text itself contains testimonies confirming this material neutrality, following the model of the defeat of early Muslims at the Battle of Uhud due to a military tactical error. This means that faith offers no immunity against loss to anyone who neglects material causes. Yet, the contemporary reactionary mentality ignores these lessons and obstinately consumes the metaphysical narcotic to justify continuous failure.

This cognitive defect extends to encompass the media and cultural structure tasked with formulating collective consciousness in these societies, where a pronounced infatuation with linguistic exaggeration and the use of amplification terms such as "historical victory," "historical visit," or "historical encounter" stands out. This verbal excess reflects a buried desire to manufacture illusory heroisms that confer a false sense of grandeur and elevation upon the masses within a context that lacks genuine development projects or cognitive independence. When the Egyptian team defeated New Zealand, pens and platforms rushed to qualify the event as historical, elevating a simple statistical figure related to a first tournament victory to the rank of a national and religious miracle. But this same media apparatus is struck with expressive muteness when defeat occurs. No one dares to qualify the loss against Argentina as a historical defeat. On the contrary, the event is immediately stripped of its superior dimensions to be attributed to bad luck, refereeing errors, or discrepancies in material means, which were deliberately forgotten at the moment of victory. This blatant double standard shows how the unseen is treated as a utilitarian and temporary tool: victory is attributed to prayers, blessing, and fighting spirit so as to have a sacred father, while defeat remains an orphan, claimed by no one, and people rush to find material scapegoats for it. This fluctuation between metaphysical arrogance and material justification reveals that reactionary discourse does not possess a coherent vision of reality; it is merely a fragile defensive mechanism that collapses at the first confrontation with solid facts on the ground.

Among the shocking manifestations that reveal the depth of the structural crisis in environments of religious bigotry is the absence of pluralism and the implicit cultural and institutional sorting that strikes religious minorities. This is evident in the Egyptian case through the near-total absence of Coptic Christian players within the national teams and major clubs. Transforming sport into an arena for rituals, collective prayers, and spiritual sermons inside locker rooms creates an exclusive and non-integrative environment for citizens of other religions. This illustrates how independent (freelance) religious practices, supported by traditional institutions like Al-Azhar or independent preachers, transform into a tool for dividing society and destroying the concept of inclusive citizenship. The great historical irony here lies in the fact that the system that supported the ousting of groups such as the Brothers Musulmans under the pretext of refusing the mixing of religion and politics practices today the same mental mechanism in interpreting life, the universe, and sport. The superior political organization was eliminated, but the Brotherhood and Salafist mentality, based on interpreting natural and social phenomena as divine punishments or rewards, remains dominant in the media and on the street. This identification proves that reactionism is not merely a partisan organization that can be banned, but a mode of thinking and a cognitive disease that colonizes collective consciousness and reproduces itself in different forms, as long as it is not deconstructed by a rational and bold critique of the heritage and its mechanisms of operation.

This mentality of ideological blockage is not confined to conservative religious currents alone. It is a cross-cutting characteristic of political and doctrinal orientations in the region, where divergent forces such as nationalists, communists, socialists, and democrats join Islamists in adopting the same cognitive representations in crisis when analyzing major conflicts. When these forces face political or military defeats before Western or Israeli projects of hegemony, they immediately fall into the trap of the language of cosmic victimization and the magical expectation of absolute justice that will come to vindicate the weak party for the simple reason that it holds the moral right. This shared consciousness is incapable of realizing that history does not care about the nobility of causes if they are not supported by the tools of power, technological modernization, and institutional capacity. The successive defeats of projects that brandish slogans of resistance and spiritual sovereignty reveal that the enemy does not triumph because it possesses a higher capital of morals or invisible legitimacy, but because it possesses rigorous scientific systems, democratic institutions allowing for criticism and accountability, and a cognitive superiority that translates into military and economic superiority. As long as political and cultural elites of all stripes rely on flattering the emotions of the masses and invoking metaphysics to cover structural failure, they will continue to rotate in a vicious circle of successive shocks, where each new defeat is greeted with stupor and denial, instead of being the catalyst for a radical revision that sheds illusions and restores value to reason and science.

The deconstruction of narratives that link the results of sporting matches or the outcomes of military conflicts to direct divine will leads us to understand the existential crisis experienced by contemporary traditional thought. When one promotes the idea that the defeat of a team or an organization raising religious slogans is a defeat of God, this thought is caught in its own trap. It places the mythical God it manufactured in its imagination into a position of an earthly material wager doomed to failure in advance. God, as an unseen system in religious thought, is supposed to transcend earthly trivialities, sporting games, and narrow political conflicts. However, making him a guarantor or sponsor of military projects or sporting teams is the pinnacle of cognitive debasement and the clearest manifestation of a modern paganism masked by slogans of monotheism. When Argentina triumphs on the pitch or the forces of material hegemony triumph in politics, they do not triumph over God, but over the limited human narratives that attempted to monopolize heaven and exploit it to serve their narrow interests or to flee the demands of hard work. True triumph and civilizational development begin only when God returns to his individual unseen space, and the earth is left to human beings to manage with their minds and sweat, according to the laws of science and free institutions where there is no bias toward a turban or toward the title of the Eleven of Prostrators.

In conclusion, it appears clearly that the binary vision dividing the world into soldiers of God and the party of Satan is responsible for manufacturing the successive existential shocks in the Arab and Islamic collective consciousness. The historical defeat we are witnessing today is not a defeat of the sacred in itself, but the inevitable defeat of narratives of bigotry and religious and political reaction that believed spiritual slogans could run a state, lead an army, or score a goal in the net of a professional opponent. Overturning these illusions and exposing the media and cultural discourse that feeds them are the first steps toward building a new consciousness that reconciles with reality and material laws. Society will not emerge from the swamp of civilizational decline by increasing doses of the metaphysical narcotic or inventing new arrogant appellations, but by frankly recognizing that balances of power are built in laboratories, universities, and free institutions, and that the ball, much like war, gives only to those who dedicate effort and intelligence to it. Outside this strict material framework, nothing remains but hollow rhetoric and the traumas of defeats that never end.

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