What's up with the shoes?

FLASHBACK: The Other Foot

by TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, April 11, 2003 12:01 A.M. EDT

I was in a bar (as one frequently is) at the end of a day's labors. There were televisions lit up, one on the left, another on the right, with pictures from statue-strewn Baghdad streets. And just then the barmaid across from me, clearly thirsting as much for information on another culture as I was for a Scotch, asked aloud, and quizzically: "What's with the shoes?!"

How can one not have noticed, and wondered about, the shoes?

In recent days we've seen Baghdadis, Basrans, Kirkukis, Karbalites, Dearbornis--Iraqis of all sorts--assaulting every fallen statue of Saddam Hussein, every unseated portrait of the tyrant, with their footwear. We've seen leather shoes, plastic sandals, rubber flip-flops, even (or was this an illusion?) some Nikes, long-laced and incongruous. Everything but stiletto heels, which aren't, if I may be permitted a rare generalization, big in the Arab world, at least not in public.

These images--these flailings of sole against statuary--have been among the most charming of any to emerge from Freed Iraq, and arguably the most intriguing to Western viewers. One can comprehend the toppling of the totemic figures in town squares, and one has, in fact, seen this sort of thing before: in Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Romania and other places at the end of the Cold War. But one never saw men in Vilnius, Cracow, Minsk or Timisoara flay their bronze or plaster Lenins and Ceaucescus with their shoes. There may have been some kicking, but no one in the East Bloc ever discalced himself to hand-deliver a thrashing to a crippled icon.
So what is it with the shoes in Iraq?

As anyone who has been to the Middle East (or even to countries like India) knows, the foot and shoe are imbued with considerable significance.

The foot occupies the lowest rung in the bodily hierarchy and the shoe, in addition to being something in which the foot is placed, is in constant contact with dirt, soil and worse. The sole of the shoe is the most unclean part of an unclean object. In northern India, where I grew up, the exhortation "Jooté maro!" ("Hit him with shoes!") was invoked when one sought to administer the most demeaning punishment. (Another footwear tidbit: The effigies of unpopular politicians in India are regularly garlanded with shoes and paraded down the streets.)

In the Muslim world, according to Hume Horan, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, "to have the sole of the shoe directed toward one is pretty much the equivalent of someone in our culture giving you the finger." Matthew Gordon, a historian of Islam, says that since one takes one's shoes off before entering a mosque--as a way of maintaining the purity of the place of worship--"the use of a shoe as something to hit you with is an inversion, directing impurity and pollution at the object of the beating."

The fact that the shoe-as-anathema idea stretches across the Arab world into India suggests that the cultural aversions (and the attendant insults) predate Islam and may have had their origins in a poorly understood--but basically correct--connection between dirt (i.e., pollution) and footwear. In societies where levels of public hygiene are low (e.g., much of the Middle East and the Indian Subcontinent), it is still commonplace to remove one's shoes before entering a private home, and not just places of worship. Which begs the question, of course, of why shoes weren't so removed in medieval Europe, whose streets were just as dung-flecked, or are not so removed in present-day, non-Muslim Africa.