I just heard in coverage of the situation in Baghdad that the Iraqi citizens were throwing shoes and slippers at the downed statue of Saddam, and that to Arabs, this was a terrible insult.
Why?
You should see what Arabs sometimes step in and you’d understand!
Actually, there is an interesting parallel in the Bible, not that this is necesarily related, but in a cosmic sense, there could be something to it…
When the angels visit Abraham (still Abram), he has them take off their shoes first since he thought they were people (Arabs) and the practice those days amongst the Arabs was to worship the dust as a form of idolotry, and Abraham didn’t want idolotry in his tents!
Perhaps the Iraqis are symbolically casting off Saddam as their idol! Note the connection with the statue, commonly an idol, and the shoes! Hmmmm…
IIRC, in some cultures, Arabic culture being one of them, the feet are considered the dirtiest/lowest part of the body. So pelting likenesses of Saddam with shoes/sandals/slippers/other footwear is basically a gesture of extreme disrespect.
Rather than start a new thread I’ll throw an almost completely unrelated question in here and hope it gets answered. I was under the impression that statues were not acceptable in Islamic society. That it was a form of idolatry. And that was why there are no likenesses of Mohammed. Does that only apply to Mohammed, or am I completly off base. Or did Saddam just say ‘screw it, I putting up a big-ass statue of me anyway’.
Well, Saddam ran Iraq as a secular society. He made appeals to religion only when his arse was in a sling.
It’s true that images of Mohammed are prohibited, as are images of just about any religious subject. That’s why a Muslims developed such a beautiful calligraphy to illustrate their religious texts.
Anything that Saddam did with regard to religion was lip service. He put up statues to feed his ego and show his dominance, and didn’t give a rat’s ass about religion.
However, I do not think that the prohibition against images applies to every possible topic, so statues of a political leader may be perfectly acceptable.
It is definitely a great insult to hit things with one’s shoes in Arab countries.
Don’t know where it started, but imagine how we give some obscene gestures and it doesn’t seem too silly.
IIRC there were plenty of images of Ayatollah Khomeini on view during the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
I recall during the first gulf conflict a lady screaming “Saddam is my shoe”, and the reporter saying that it was one of the worst insults you could give a person.
I’m betting their pit rants would never score more than 0.01 on our scale.
In most Arabic cultures, it’s considered a grave insult to show the soles of your feet to someone. If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that the shoe-throwing is probably an example of this behaviour taken to the extreme.
Shi’a Islam doesn’t prohibit paintings and other images; Sunni Islam does. Strictly speaking, even paintings or carvings of flowers, birds, or any living thing is prohibited.
Trinopus
She then went on to say:
Saddam’s moustache is the lint between my toes. His breath is the billowed stench that emanates from my sock. His sons are corns on my arch. His face is the callous on my heel. Saddam deep kisses the sole of my workboots!
Peace.
I think it was her…
I worked for a company that employed people in Kuwait. They had a little handbook for new employees going over. It said that women should never wear sleeveless shirts and NEVER let someone see the soles of your shoes. I’d last about 30 seconds over there.
Here’s a bit more about shoes as an insult in Arab culture.
At the At the Al-Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, Saddam put in a mosaic of the first president Bush, on the floor, so that it would be walked on.
But now U.S. forces tore it up – and replaced it with an image of Saddam.
Sic sandal tyranus.
A blogger claims that feet are a euphemism for the genitals, which would explain the offensiveness of shoes. But that gives rise to the question “How did that come about?”
Not to, uh, pussyfoot around the question…
People have been stoned to death for better puns than that! 
I reckon nobody in the middle east knows oriental martial arts.
It could be an association derived from the sensory homunculus, where the genitals and the feet are in close proximity.
I’ll second this. A Palestinian friend of mine explained that showing the soles of your feet to someone indicates that they are beneath you, i.e. they are mere dirt to be trod upon.
Throwing shoes would be an extension of this and much more threathening than hopping after some guy with one leg raised before you.