JUMBI, Zanzibar — “People have tried to stop me from playing,” said Riziki Abdallah, sitting in her mother’s humble home in the village of Dole in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. “They say, ‘Don’t play soccer, soccer is only for men.’”

In Zanzibar, you see children playing soccer not infrequently, and people watching World Cup matches on TVs in corner restaurants, like anywhere else. But what you do not see are women playing. Here soccer, though popular, is limited to boys and men. Through public pressure, lack of sponsorship, and family shaming, women are discouraged from playing.

“I’ve never been attacked physically,” Abdallah, 23, added, shooting a nervous glance at her mother across the room. “But they tell me and my family that they are not happy, and that I should not be playing soccer.”

Abdallah is better known in Zanzibar by her nickname, Chadole, which means the “shorty from Dole,” the rural village of 1,000 people where she grew up. She is part of a community of six teams that form the women’s club soccer league in Zanzibar. Despite societal pressures derived from conservative beliefs about the role of women, the athletes in the Zanzibari women’s league persist, rallying together without resources or support because of their sheer love of the game.

Their resistance to criticism has brought them together into what feels like the beginning of a movement. On the field they laugh and embrace, and many of the players have forged close friendships. Their hope is that women’s soccer will one day receive government recognition and support of the type men’s soccer receives in Zanzibar. But most of all, they simply want to be able to play.

“I am committed to playing,” Abdallah said. “I am not afraid of anything.”

Abdallah’s insistence on playing separates her from her community in Dole, and her skill separates her from everyone else on the island. She is a star of the Zanzibari women’s national team. On the field she weaves past other players with dominance, thanks to a decade of finely honed footwork.

That footwork was on full display during a recent late afternoon game between her team, the Jumbi Woman Fighter, and the Green Queens. Jumbi, a rural village about the same size as Dole, hosted the match; it was the first game of the league’s 2018 season. Some players combed the dicey field, picking up softball-size rocks and tossing them past the sideline. The crowd began as sparse, with some family and friends beside the field, but quickly grew as word of the match spread. A group of young men, some in kanzus, leaned against a pile of bricks behind the goal, playfully taunting the players. “Get her!” they shouted in Swahili. “Don’t let her get past you!”

Seven of the women on the field play on the Zanzibari national team. Ramadan and the dazzling Eid al-Fitr celebrations that follow it had just ended, so many of the women still bore the signs of Eid festivities, including nails stained orange, wrists wrapped in delicate henna designs, and freshly braided hair that contrasted with their bright jerseys and neon cleats. The women do not play soccer during Ramadan; fasting (including abstaining from drinking water) makes play in the scorching heat of Zanzibari days almost impossible. And even after the fast is broken in the evening, tradition holds that only men play in the evenings during Ramadan, if at all.

Abdallah started playing soccer when she was 11, after a coach showed up in her school classroom and asked if any girls wanted to go to the mainland of Tanzania, where women’s soccer is more widespread, to play in a match. “He said they needed girls, and that was my chance,” Abdallah said. “When I came back, I sidelined everything else.” She started borrowing cleats from her brother, and in a habit she continues, she started training in the early mornings in the sand along the nearby Zanzibari coast.

Her timing was fortuitous. About the same time, a movement was afoot to start the first women’s soccer team in Zanzibar. In 2007, a documentary about the difficulty Zanzibari women faced in starting that team was making the rounds in international film festivals. It emboldened Nassra Juma Mohammed, a former Zanzibari player on the Tanzanian national team (and one of this year’s World Cup commentators in Zanzibar), to commit to starting a league. She named the first team Women Fighters (which inspired the Jumbi Woman Fighter team name), because, she recalls, “We were always fighting to be able to share the pitches with the men.” Mohammed is now considered the godmother of women’s soccer in Zanzibar, which has grown to include six teams in a women’s club league, as she envisioned.

Rukia Talib Yahya, 19 and of the Green Queens, recalls being told by her mother that she could not play, until finally a coach who works with Mohammed came to the home and persuaded the mother to allow her to try. “There is still the perception that soccer for women is a bad practice, that it’s bad behavior,” she said in her family home in the Kiembe Samaki neighborhood outside of Zanzibar’s capital. “I’m not sure my mom is 100 percent happy.”

The island’s Muslim heritage and the conservative positions of many of the women’s families, while perhaps not causal, may be correlated. While not all Muslim families take issue with women playing soccer, the experience of the female soccer players in Zanzibar has been marked by constant criticism. In Zanzibar, 99 percent of the population is Muslim, while in mainland Tanzania the population is predominantly Christian. The women here usually keep their headscarves on when they play soccer in the streets or in practice, but during league games, they take them off just before the whistle blows for play to begin.

“Soccer is a man’s sport,” Hassan Tawakal, the Zanzibar Sports Council commissioner, said matter-of-factly, from his office in downtown Stone Town. He oversees both the men’s and women’s leagues in Zanzibar, but he said “tradition” inhibits his office’s ability to effectively promote women’s soccer. “It’s hard to have soccer for women because some teams are not good role models for women,” he said. “Most coaches have said that most of the female players do not have good discipline.”

But perhaps nothing conveys the stigma that still exists in Zanzibar against women’s soccer more than the fact that girls are not able to play the sport as part of their physical education in schools.

Soccer is offered in all schools in Zanzibar, just not for girls. Girls are instead ushered toward netball, a kind of basketball game with no dribbling and a designated shooter. Many women who play on the soccer teams today learned to play in the streets after school with neighborhood boys; for many of them, the league is their first chance to play with other women.

Jumbi’s head coach, Khalid Khamis Suleiman, 34, said, “I would be the happiest man if the government introduced soccer in schools for girls,” adding, “and if Chadole had grown up playing soccer in school, she would absolutely be one of the best female soccer players anywhere.”

When asked about having soccer for girls in the schools, Balozi Ali Abeid A. Karume, the son of Zanzibar’s former president and the new minister of Information, Culture, Tourism and Sports, seemed surprised at the thought. “Women in Zanzibar like to be very feminine,” he said, “so if you tell them to participate in sports they will say, ‘No, I don’t want to be like a man.’”

He mentions his favorite all-male English Premier League teams, saying he is a big soccer fan, and, eventually, he seems to come around to the idea of allowing girls to play soccer in schools. “I think I would be interested in promoting that,” he said toward the end of the interview. “It’s a good idea. I think it is something to look into, since it is where the world is headed.”

Farida Hamisi Kopnibo, 14, certainly hopes so. She is one of the youngest of Abdallah’s teammates, and she is considered by coaches to be a star of the next generation of women’s soccer. With parents who both work for the government, Farida grew up in substantially different conditions from Abdallah. But despite her socioeconomic advantages, she also reports having faced difficulty in pursuing her dream of playing soccer. While sitting in the living room with her parents, she acknowledges that some of her mother’s friends don’t think she should be playing. “They are not happy,” she said.