…..Bringing them to heel. Or the heel hits the heel. There are questions of etiquette, gamesmanship and local custom involved mixed with religious practice. After all, showing the sole of your shoe is an an insult in Arab culture, though its origins are a bit murky. And hitting someone with a shoe is seen as even worse. But, to those subject to forty odd lashes or limb dismemberment by sword, its probably a respite to be whacked with the sole of the shoe, preferably crepe soles. Since the left hand is sufficiently demonized in Islamic culture, perhaps the insult could be intensified if the left shoe had the honor of being the projectile of choice, or that the shoe was whipped at the target with the left hand, the one one used to wipe the derriere after doing your business.
The shoe itself has a reputation for being considered unclean because its habitat is at ground zero and the foot is the lowest part of the body and had to socialize with some of the creepy crawlers of devastating and strange appearance one encounters in the Middle East. considered dirty because it is on the ground and associated with the foot, the lowest part of the body. Hitting someone with a shoe is a kind of status act in that the victim is regarded as even lower on the pecking order. Women rarely seem to have footwear of any sort thrown at them, since their position as low seems constitutionally grounded without appeal or amendment. So, its always good to have a cheap pair of casuals ready to throw, such as when dictators get topped or even practice sessions at effigies of Israeli leaders.
—It was big news in 2008 when then President George W. Bush had a shoe thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist during a visit to Baghdad. In the streets of Cairo, Egyptians who are protesting Hosni Mubarak are brandishing their footwear, an insult in Arab cultures.—click image for source…
The Also, the insult can be burnished if they happen to be the shoes of a deceased person; you are hitting them with death thus placing a curse on their soul as well as well as the cause of death of the dearly departed being being used to further blasphemize the target. Categorically, shoe throwing could wedge its way into the comforts of the fatwa. Lastly, the use of a leather shoe is considered more poisonous since leather has been traditionally known and medically proven as a conductor of contagious diseases.
There is a secret language of shoes which in subtlety equals the hidden language of Japanese ethics and protocol. For example, it is viewed as culturally rude to cross and ankle over a knee and showing the sole of a shoe while engaging in conversation. Less dangerous sitting spraddle legged with the the fly undone. Lastly, since being called a dog seems more severe an insult in Islamic societies, a two-fer or double dose would be to hurl and Hush Puppy shoe…
Washiington Post, Syria:A wide range of cases are adjudicated, including kidnapping, murder, marriage and divorce, he said, and the authority has a department that administers issues such as property and vehicle ownership.
The codes applied are “derived from the Islamic religion,” the spokesman said, but the most extreme Islamic punishments, such as cutting off the hands of thieves, are not imposed because Islamic law requires that they be suspended during war.
Instead, he said, sentences of five to 40 lashes for offenses such as drug abuse, adultery and theft are handed down, so that wrongdoers can return to their families, which otherwise might be deprived of wage earners if they were kept in prison. “It is not a big punishment, and we don’t use heavy pipes — they are small pipes — to tell him off,” the spokesman said….
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Then it was repeated in Cairo in February 2013 – this time a Syrian throwing his shoe at Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to Cairo, which started with an affectionate welcome on Tuesday from Egypt’s new Islamist president,” reports the New York Times, “turned less pleasant as the day wore on. First, Mr Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, was lectured by a senior Sunni Muslim cleric and then was nearly struck with a shoe by a man furious at Iran’s support for the Syrian government.”
It was at both these occasions that generations of anthropological scholarship on the Arab and Muslim world – their mind and manners – all came to pay and inform the American and European public. What were they to make of such bizarre gestures of throwing shoes at people? …
…The HTS has of course a grand cultural anthropologist to look up to – a man named Raphael Patai, who in fact taught at my own university here in New York, among many other Israeli and American centres of higher education, and who wrote a widely popular book called The Arab Mind (originally published in 1973 and subsequently revised and updated in 1983 and again in 2007) which soon after the US-led invasion of Iraq became the most trusted handbook that American military used to understand Iraq and Iraqis so they could be made to behave better. As Brian Whitaker of the Guardian discovered:
According to one professor at a US military college, The Arab Mind is “probably the single most popular and widely read book on the Arabs in the US military”.
is even used as a textbook for officers at the JFK special warfare school in Fort Bragg.Had it not been for this masterpiece of American cultural anthropology, the US military would have never known that we in the Arab and Muslim world are categorically and genetically lazy, sex-obsessed, owners of at least four wives and plenty of sex slave concubines, which anthropological insights were subsequently used in Abu Ghraib by the US military by way of enhancing the already enhanced interrogation techniques. No “Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology” can come even close to appreciating the significance of such anthropological services. It really took a great work of art like Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty to show to the public at large the invaluable services that these techniques can provide in saving American lives.
…Here I am particularly thinking of an absolute masterpiece of this genre of anthropology, a book titled Passionate Uprisings: Iran’s Sexual Revolution about the sexual orgies that Iranian women were conducting just before the rise of the Green Movement by way of collective political protest. Though not an anthropologist by training, but from the vantage point of an eminent historian, Bernard Lewis had also made similar comments about Arabs sexual frustrations and the rise of the Arab Spring.
“Another thing,” Bernard Lewis suggests regarding the rise of Arab revolutions we call the Arab Spring, “is the sexual aspect of it. One has to remember that in the Muslim world, casual sex, Western-style, doesn’t exist. If a young man wants sex, there are only two possibilities – marriage and the brothel. You have these vast numbers of young men growing up without the money, either for the brothel or the bride-price, with raging sexual desire. On the one hand, it can lead to the suicide bomber, who is attracted by the virgins of paradise – the only ones available to him. On the other hand, sheer frustration.” …Read More:http://m.aljazeera.com/story/201322691640324311
COMMENTS