The recent Muslim shoe throwing incident, a great insult for Muslims and merely comedic for Westerners, leads me to these questions.
Do muslims use the word “fuck” in their languages as an insult ?
If not, would we appear comedic as well to a foreign Muslim by telling them to fuck off in their language ?
Can’t speak to Muslim cultures in particular (and of course as with all these questions, it has more to do with culture than religion. I’m sure a 4th generation Mulsim Pakistani immigrant to the UK would be perfectly familiar with the F-word). But I know alot of cultures simply use English swear words, if there is no equivalent in their language.
I would actually guess that throwing a shoe was considerably worse than yelling “Fuck You!”. I find it hard to beleive that no westerner has ever yelled “Fuck You!” to GWB on tape, and yet we certainly haven’t heard about it. If we did hear about it, we all laughed and said, “yea what a douchbag!” and forgot about it. Throwing a shoe though seems to be a major insult in the ME. Besides, the guy that threw the shoe isn’t getting it back. There is an actuall cost to doing it, but just saying “Fuck You!” doesn’t really lose you anything. Frankly, I think if Cheney had slapped Patrick Leahy with his shoe, it would have been a much bigger deal even in the west.
Your mother wears combat boots!
You’re making a whopping great assumption, that uttering ‘fuck’ is as offensive to a westerner (we’re not talking religion here, but culture) than the shoe-throwing.
Question: What did those Iraqis do to that statue (actually a rather insignificant one) of Saddam after it was pulled over?
They took their shoes off and hit it with them. Seriously.
It’s a BIG thing to do anything like that. More along American-flag-burning lines than FCC-compliance concerns.
1 Billion people, from Morroco to Malaya. From S Europe to NW China. LOts of languages and cultures! I can only speak for Pakistanis, but yes "fuck "dose exits, often as an invitation to fuck a reletive; Bahan Chod the worst swear word in S Asia; sister fucker.
Pakistan is a country whose official language is english, the country cousin of your immigrent would understand the word perfectly.
Soooo…would a variant of “shoe fucker” be the worst of the worst, then?
This was *not *a Muslim shoe-throwing incident. It was an Arab shoe-throwing incident.
Throwing a shoe as a sign of disrespect is part of Arab culture, not teachings of Islam. Because so many Arabs are Muslim, there is a tendency to confuse matters of Arab culture with teachings of Islam (for example, head coverings for women go back much earlier than Islam). This would be a little bit like an alien visiting Italy and concluding that Catholics eat a lot of pasta.
Assuming you mean Muslim as in Arabs (as has already been noted), then yes, they do (like every culture on the face of the Earth as far as I can tell).
However, insults in Arabic tend to be much more creative than that, and extremely filthy/graphic. It’s kind of a linguistic game. “I fucked you mother in the ass with a lollipop then your father ate it while fucking a dog, curse his religion” is a perfectly valid insult, guaranteed to produce frothing at the mouth.
Of course, there’s also your everyday usage “Your mother’s a whore”, “Suck my dick” etc… but when one really wishes to offend for realz, imagination is hmm rewarded 
Comedic ? Dunno. Though I doubt the expression for “fuck off” in Arabic would litteraly translate as “fuck off”, if you follow me, but there’s no shortage of Arabic words to express an emphatic desire to see someone go away.
But even if Arabic’s not your bag, do not despair ! For there is hope yet according to the great Billy Connoly, as expressed in a lovely documentary soberly entitled : Fuck (2005)
In that case, it’s a good that’s the only thing the find offensive. :rolleyes:
I had considered that issue, however I did catch a blurb on the TV during a report on the incident explaining how shoes were unclean in Islam, requiring their removal before entering a mosque. A religous take on a shoe’s “character” sure adds weight to the insult.
I’d be interested to find out however if the practice of insulting with shoes is limited Arabs or not.
They do shoot people “the bird” which means “fuck you” universally, right?
Saw that recently on CNN while in Germany. Had the sound turned down, but it was a young terrorist who had been found guilty, and, as he was being taken out of the courtroom, he double-birdied the news cam.
Hmmmm. “Double-birdied”. That’s golf terminology, right?
Maybe I should have said a double flip-off.
:shrug:
Q
Well shit. We better try not to piss her off.
FWIW, just about every twentysomething male in Oman knows the phrase “fuck you!” and how to use it in traffic.
No they don’t. Their version of the finger is … throwing the classic thumbs up sign, which to them means “up yours”. Obviously, some miscommunication happened when they greeted the US liberators with rows of thumbs up 
The bird is certainly not universal, either. Google “Hawaian Good Luck Sign” if you want a cheap laugh.
In my two years in Muslim Northern Cameroon I didn’t manage to learn one single cuss word. I’m sure they exist, but the culture there greatly valued emotional control. It was the kind of culture where everybody carries a knife, but you’d never know it because those knives are only coming out if they are going to be used. The only time it was every acceptable to cry was if you were a woman of childbearing age and your close relative died, and even then your window to cry was three days exactly. If you were angry enough to take action, that was one thing. But to rant and rave and throw insults would be seen as a moral failing on your part.
In practical terms, people had no idea what “fuck” meant, and that lead to some pretty funny choices from the "Western thrift store reject’ bundles on sale at every market. One student of mine came to school in a shirt that said “Do you fancy a fuck?” Another sweet and adorable eight year old boy on my street had a denim vest with “Fuck you” proudly written on the back. Well, I guess it beat his other set of clothing- a pair of pink satin Barbie pajamas.
Are you sure about this? The only reason I ask is because I saw two guys get into some kind of drawn out shouting match in Malaysia once that ended with one of the guys throwing both his shoes at the other. Of course, the shoe thrower could have been Arab, but he seemed local.
Maybe it was a young Random Task.
The shoe-throwing incident was not comedic to *this *Westerner at all. I took it very seriously because even though I am not a Muslim, I understand that the shoe-throwing was meant as a insult. A very serious insult.
Actually, it is insulting that any Westerner would not take such an insult seriously and it smacks of ethnocentrism, cultural patronization and just a general sense of, “Ha ha ha! Those funny little brown people and their silly little customs! I pray they find Jesus Christ soon!”
When presented in the wrong context, shoes and feet can be a great insult in Thailand and perhaps other parts of SE Asia (like Malaysia) as well. Although there are Muslims in Thailand (particularly in the south) this custom seems to be independent of religion.