Radical Islam is now rearing its head in the Indian Premier League.
Chennai Super Kings seems to have removed the mention of sponsor SNJ 10000 from Moeen Ali’s jersey. A week ago, there had been reports that Moeen Ali had requested the team management to remove the logo of the alcohol brand from the jersey he sports while playing for the franchise. The Chennai Super Kings had then clarified that Moeen Ali had made no such request, and the issue seemed to have died down.
However, in yesterday’s match between Chennai Super Kings and Punjab Kings, Moeen Ali did not sport the SNJ 10000 logo on his CSK jersey. All Chennai’s players had the SNJ 10000 logo above the IPL logos on their jerseys, with the exception of Moeen Ali. Moeen Ali, on the left, doesn’t have the SNJ 10000 logo on his jersey, while other players did.
The missing SNJ 10000 logo can also be seen here, when Moeen Ali, on the left, was batting with another CSK player. The logo is missing from Moeen Ali’s jersey, while visible on the jersey of the other player.
As such, it would appear that CSK’s team management wasn’t being completely honest when it said that Moeen Ali hadn’t requested the team to remove the logo. “There has been no request made by Moeen to CSK to remove any logo,” Kasi Vishwanathan, the Chief Executive Officer of Chennai Super Kings, said on 5th April.
The removal of the logo from Moeen Ali’s jersey is yet another example of how Islamic fundamentalism is creeping into into everyday life, and even cricket is not untouched. Moeen Ali is a practicing Muslim, and personally doesn’t consume alcohol, but his demand to have the SNJ 10000 logo removed from his jersey is anything but reasonable — sponsorships are decided by teams, and they can’t keep in mind the personal preferences of every player when striking these deals. A vegetarian player, for instance, can’t ask his team to remove the logo of KFC from his team’s jersey, while a player who prefers drinking Coke can’t refuse to sport the Pepsi logo. Yet Chennai Super Kings seem to have given a Muslim player a long rope to impose his personal intolerant beliefs on the team, and hurt their own sponsor instead.
To make matters worse, Moeen Ali isn’t even Indian. He’s English, and it’s unthinkable that an Indian player playing for English county side could possibly ask for a sponsor to remove its logo if they happened to be producers of beef. Yet the IPL, and Chennai Super Kings in particular, seem to have kneeled before this rank intolerance, and allowed a radical minority from imposing their beliefs on India’s biggest sports league.
