MUNTADAR Al-Zeidi will go down in the annals of popular protest as the man who kissed the Bush presidency goodbye by hurling his shoes at the outgoing US president. On Dec. 14, the Iraqi journalist who worked for Al-Baghdadiya Television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, stood up during a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki and threw his shoes at Bush on behalf of “the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq.”
While throwing your shoes at someone would be considered insulting in any culture, in the Arab world the gesture has a special potency: Footwear is commonly used to deliver both verbal and physical insult. In Egypt, for example, many popular and colorful insults include the mention of shoes: “You son of a shoe,” “You have shoes for brains,” “You’ll follow me like an old shoe,” etc.
Although the offensiveness of these insults is largely lost in translation, delivered in Arabic they are a sure-fire way of getting people’s backs up. But why this obsession with shoes? Does it reflect a weird foot fetish? One shoe-lover found the whole episode a terrible waste of a pair of perfectly good shoes.
The offensive power of shoes probably has something to do with the lowly status of the shoe, which resides, downtrodden with its face in the dirt, all the way at the bottom of the clothing hierarchy. That’s why worshippers leave their shoes outside mosques.
That is probably why working-class Egyptian women are known to take off their shoes or slippers to hit men who harass them on the street: To show that the man belongs in the gutter.
“This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” Al-Zeidi yelled, delivering a second insult, popular in Arabic. In English, there is a gender distinction. While “bitch” is an insult, “dog” has less impact in English. But the same does not hold in the Arab world: If you call someone “ibn kalb” (son of a dog), you’re insulting both the person and his forebears.
The reason could be a difference in cultural perceptions. While dogs in the West are widely seen as “man’s best friend,” in the Muslim world, dogs are regarded as impure animals and usually not kept as pets, except for security purposes.
While this “shoe incident” was little consolation for the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who suffered under the crush of the Bush administration’s boots, many Arabs applauded Al-Zeidi’s audacity.
Others believed he overstepped the bounds of decorum. Let’s just hope that journalists will not, as a consequence of this isolated act, be forced, under new Homeland Security regulations, to remove their shoes before entering White House briefings and other presidential media events.
Al-Zeidi has been arrested for his act. Of course, had he caused Bush physical injury, he could have been charged for that. But his action was essentially one of freedom of expression, which includes the freedom to cause offense. If Bush believes in any of his own rhetoric, he should join the chorus of voices calling for the journalist’s immediate release.
