What Gary Lineker could learn from Herodotus

Gary Lineker has unfolded his thoughts on the World Cup in Qatar (Romans called them Catharrei). ‘It’s a delicate balance between “sports-washing” and trying to make change,’ he intoned. Actually, the issue is quite different. Let Herodotus (5th C bc), the first western historian and a man of inexhaustible curiosity and vitality, put you right.

Herodotus’ aim was to discover the reason for the enmity between Greeks and Persians that led to the Persian Wars (491-479 bc). Researching Persia’s rise to power took him around the Greek East, Persia, Egypt, Africa and South Russia, and the different cultures he came across filled him with fascination and wonder. Of course he saw things through Greek eyes, but his open-mindedness and readiness to understand the experience of others gave him a rare breadth of sympathy with the different cultures of the people with whom he came into contact. It is unusual for him to criticise, common for him to praise – a response that some of his fellow Greeks did not appreciate.

The famous conclusion that he drew from his experience (described in this column before) emerged from his reflections on the Persian King Cambyses, whom he thought completely mad for mocking and abusing the religion and traditions of his enemies.

No sane person would do that, Herodotus concluded, because every people believed its own cultural traditions were superior to any other’s. He provided a single, powerful example: the mutual revulsion of some Greeks and Indians at each other’s different funerary customs, the Greeks cremating their dead, the Indians eating them. He concluded: ‘Custom rules over everyone.’

As it has over Qatar, ever since it was Islamised in the 7th C ad. It is as westernised as it is ever going to be, Mr Lineker, and however many armbands anyone wears and however much you or anyone else breast-beats over sportswashing, Qatar is not going to turn into Brighton, now or ever. Even less so after witnessing a million supporters rampaging through their country.