FaithWorld

South Africa’s Muslim community says as many as 130,000 Muslim fans could visit for the World Cup and it has set up welcome centres and a website to inform visitors where to eat and pray close to stadiums.

In Cape Town, local Muslims are expecting to welcome Muslim supporters from Algeria, who will play England in Cape Town on Friday, as well as fans of Muslim faith from competing nations such as Nigeria, Ghana, Ivory Coast and Cameroon.

Just minutes from Cape Town’s Green Point stadium is the Bo-Kaap district, one of the city’s oldest residential quarters and traditionally associated with the Muslim community. (Photo: A mosque in the Bo-Kaap district of Cape Town, 20 April 2010/Mike Hutchings)

A special exhibition at the Bo-Kaap museum offers information about the history of Islam in South Africa as well as practical tips on where to eat and pray. A special “Islamic Cape Town Map” has also been produced and left in the prayer room of the airport.

Similar initiatives are taking place in other host cities and there is also a website: www.samuslims2010.net.

A Kenyan soccer fan attends their 2010 World Cup qualifying soccer match against Nigeria at the Kasarani stadium in Kenya's capital Nairobi, November 14, 2009/Thomas Mukoya

Kenya has deployed security agents to its border with Somalia after Islamic clerics announced they had clamped down on the public broadcast of soccer and films, a security official has said.  Clerics in the frontier town of Mandera said on Monday they had confiscated a number of satellite TV dishes in a football-obsessed nation ahead of the World Cup because public film dens were corrupting youths.

“Two groups, an undercover team from National Security Intelligence Service and (an) anti-terrorist unit, arrived here on Tuesday night to investigate,” a senior local security source who did not wish to be named told Reuters late on Thursday.  Another team has been dispatched to Dadaab refugee camp which is home to some 270,000 mostly Somali refugees in the mostly Muslim region.

Organisers have postponed a conference of Nobel peace laureates in South Africa after the government denied a visa to Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989 - five years after South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu won his and four years before Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk won theirs for their roles in ending the racist apartheid regime.

Although local media said the visa ban followed pressure from China, an increasingly important investor and trade partner, the government said it had not been influenced by Beijing and that the Dalai Lama's presence was just not in South Africa's best interest at the moment.

The conference, ahead of the 2010 World Cup, had been due to discuss how to use soccer to fight xenophobia and racism.

Church of England ministers have opposed what they call the “pragmatic” approach taken by some authorities to sex and sport, which ignores the sometimes prevalent link with human trafficking.

The emergence of the “mega-brothel”, facilitated by some German cities during the 2006 football World Cup to meet the demands of the estimated three million fans at the tournament, horrified the dioceses of Winchester and Newcastle.

Signs of the same thing happening at the South Africa football World Cup in 2010 prompted the dioceses to table a motion at next month’s General Synod calling on the British government to prevent such a thing happening at the London Olympics 2012.