A Muslim football coach was prevented from playing in a match because she wears tracksuit bottoms rather than shorts: she says that wearing shorts compromises her religious beliefs. Iqra Ismail, who captained the Somalia national women’s team in 2019 was prevented from playing for Regent’s Park grassroots team United Dragons FC in the Greater London Women’s Football League because she was in her tracksuit bottoms rather than shorts. She told the BBC that

“I was warmed up, I was ready to go. I came on at half time and the referee told me that I wouldn’t be able to play unless I was wearing shorts. I have been playing the same league for nearly five years wearing the same tracksuit bottoms and I’ve never worn shorts playing competitively. I told him that I wasn’t comfortable wearing shorts in any capacity. It was a shock to me that the referee took such a strong stance on it.”

She also said that she knew a lot of Muslim women who “don’t play actively in these leagues” because they don’t feel comfortable wearing shorts.

According to the BBC report, the official FA rules state that tracksuit bottoms are only to be worn by the goalkeeper, and a later communication issued by the Greater London Women’s Football League confirmed that players must not wear tracksuit bottoms. A spokesperson from the FA told the BBC that

“We are aware of this matter, and we are in contact with Middlesex FA to ensure that it is quickly resolved. We proactively wrote to all county FAs and match officials across the women’s grassroots game earlier this year to confirm that women and girls should be allowed to wear clothing that ensures their faith or religious beliefs are not compromised. We remain deeply committed to ensuring that English football is an inclusive and welcoming environment for everybody.”

Sky Sports subsequently reported that the Football Association had apologised to Ms Ismail and that she had been told that she could wear tracksuit bottoms in future. And incidentally, match officials had apparently been issued with guidance on offences involving religious head coverings at the beginning of the year after an incident involving a Sikh footballer whose patka had been pulled by an opponent in a Spartan South Midlands League match at the beginning of January.

All of which does not appear to have much to do with “law” – but it has a great deal to do with “religion”. And reading the press reports made me begin to wonder about the distinction between “law” and “enforceable rules” and whether, from the point of view of “religion”, there was any very meaningful difference between them. The Football Association lays down the rules for football in England (and, for all I know, for Wales), and it does so, obviously, within the framework of the general law – but once players are on the pitch (or, in this case, not on the pitch), they have no choice but to abide by the rules that the FA has made.

In his latest book, Rethinking Law and Religion, Russell Sandberg notes that religion is not simply a social system but also a form of identity and suggests that:

“The question of what is ‘religious law’ is not answered by reference to institutions but is rather dependent upon the particular communication. Religious decision-making bodies – whether the Governing Body of the Church in Wales, a shariah tribunal or a Quaker meeting – all produce legal as well as non-legal kinds of communication. Whenever they produce communications based on the binary code legal/illegal, that – according to systems theory – is law.”

At the risk of committing jurisprudential heresy, I would suggest that – always subject to the general laws of the jurisdiction in which they operate – the same goes for many secular non-governmental decision-making bodies. Rules formulated by governing bodies such as the Football Association are, in effect, “laws” for the areas over which they have control: not for nothing is the MCC the guardian of the Laws of Cricket. In Russell’s terms, the rules that such bodies make are “legal kinds of communication” and, in effect, bind players, adherents or whatever by consensual compact. Obviously, they are not “laws” in the same sense as the Faculty Jurisdiction Rules, but if an aggrieved Muslim woman footballer were to tell the ref that she was seeking judicial review of an apparent FA ban on tracksuit bottoms, that would not get her on to the pitch for that afternoon’s match – even if she were subsequently successful.

If “religious decision-making bodies … all produce legal as well as non-legal kinds of communication”, the same is also true, I would suggest, for non-religious ones – and their decisions may have an effect on freedom of thought, conscience and religion as well as in purely secular areas. In Rethinking Law and Religion, Russell argues for researchers in law and religion taking a wider interdisciplinary view and adopting a more critical perspective rather than focusing narrowly on the legal regulation of religion. I would go even further and suggest that perhaps we should be taking a wider view of what constitutes secular “law” for the purposes of our commentary and analysis.

Just a thought…

[Full disclosure: I’m a member of the MCC – and I haven’t watched a football match since I was a teenager.]