When Friday Comes, By James Montague

What do you do when find yourself stuck in Dubai, locked in expat air-conditioned hell, hermetically sealed from the society you are living in? Most check their brains in at the airport and go shopping. James Montague wandered down to his local late-night café to watch a World Cup quarter-final between France and Brazil, and entered into the raucous, bellicose place that is the Middle East's obsession with football. Men in traditional dress were wildly talking, taking sides, and arguing to the point of fisticuffs over Zidane and Ronaldinho.

Montague is the latest in a line of foreign correspondents who found that football is a window on their new world. To his credit, he has taken his ticket and presented it all over the region, from Iran to Egypt, Yemen to Syria – all on a shoestring budget that leaves him without transport, reliant on strangers, or face-to-face with pill-popping Israeli soldiers in decrepit hostels.

Along the way, he finds that football both unites and divides. In Iraq, the national team has been one of the very few truly multi-ethnic institutions but it is threatened by the rise of a Kurdish state and Kurdish team. In Iran, football offers a potent symbol of national identity that the theocracy, for all its efforts, cannot dominate. In Lebanon, Montague finds football as fragmented and fractious as politics. Every grouping, from Hezbollah to the Druze, has its clubs; but their matches have become so conflict-ridden that all games must be played without a crowd. In Egypt, the stifling political dominance of Mubarak has made the terraces a place for expressing dissent. In Yemen, the nation's addiction to chewing qat is the source of both its social and sporting malaise.

Given the levels of conflict, poverty and repression, never far from the stories, you might think this a bleak journey, but Montague has a lot of fun. He chews qat with the Yemeni FA, gets stoned in a minibus in Palestine and shares a joint with ultras of Cairo's Al-Ahly. As a consequence, the prose gets awkward and clunky at times. He never quite explains why this Western export, above all, has seduced the region, but you'll forgive him. In a world that demonises the "Arab street", Montague gives us a glimpse of just how playful and human it can be.