Mohamed “Mo” Salah, the 28-year-old Egyptian professional footballer, is idolized by fans across the globe for being a goal-scoring machine for Liverpool Football Club in the English Premier League and Egypt’s national squad. But beyond his adept dribbling and scintillating scoring, the “Egyptian King” has left his mark on Liverpool in other ways.
Researchers from Stanford University in the U.S. claimed that as a visibly Muslim, and very successful, footballer, Salah has helped humanize Islam not only in Liverpool, but in Britain writ large. They called this the “Mo Salah Effect.”
Even so, they suggested, the effect isn’t limited to Salah. They wrote that other “celebrities with role-model like qualities have long been thought to shape social attitudes.”
Preston, UK, journalist Ismaeel Nakhuda poses beside the gravestone that gives the acrobat’s full name, Achmed Ben Ibrahim. (Photo courtesy Ismaeel Nakhuda/AramcoWorld Magazine)
For instance, about an hour’s drive outside of Liverpool lies the small city of Preston. There, around the turn of the 20th-century, a traveling Moroccan acrobat named Ali — known as Achmed ben Ibrahim — was part of a prominent community of Muslims that left their mark on Victorian British society.
In fact, before there was a “Mo Salah Effect,” one might say there was an “Achmed ben Ibrahim Effect,” or, at the least, a “Moroccan acrobat effect.”
The connections between the two Muslim athletes — Salah and Achmed — is a story that involves a traveling troupe of Moroccan acrobats, a Liverpudlian lawyer, and a mysterious grave located on the margins of a middle-class Lancashire cemetery.
It is also the story of the evolution of Muslim life in England and the cosmopolitan transformation of a port city like Liverpool, and how the early arrival of immigrants helped pave the way for the likes of Mo Salah to act as cultural humanitarians today.