Perhaps as an American and a Christian, I have grown accustomed to reading about images of Jesus or angels appearing on everything from windows to cinnamon rolls, but I’ve had it up to here with the holy crap that occurs every time some cleric from Babulahstan thinks he might possibly see something that even remotely resembles Mohammad. For those who don’t know, the Islamic faith expressly forbids anyone from drawing or looking at a picture of the guy, so if you follow this to its logical conclusion, no one alive today (or for that matter the last two millennia) even knows what he looks like. We all picture a bearded man wearing a turban, but in reality we do not have a clue…for all we know he could look like Gilligan or Orson Wells, but if some holy man thinks you’ve crossed the line, before you can say Ali Baba, you’re up to your arm pits in fatwa’s.
All of this brings me to my latest issue with the desert religion – they are protesting soccer balls. No, really. The 2010 World Cup will feature soccer balls with images of the flags of the world. These flags include Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq which all contain words from the Koran. Of course here, we hang John 3:16 from upper decks of football games, but put a flag on a soccer ball, sacrilege. Unfortunately, this is not the first time something like this has popped up, here are some other examples:
· In 2005, Burger King in Britain withdrew an ice cream product after Muslim customers said a label design – a stylized swirl of soft serve – looked like the Arabic script for “Allah,” when viewed sideways.
· Pamphlets have circulated in Muslim countries alleging that the famous swirly-scripted Coca Cola symbol, if viewed in a mirror, resembles the Arabic words, “No Mohammed, no Mecca.”
· Walls ice cream, was forced to scrap a new logo for use in the Middle East after Muslims in Gulf states said the symbol – a pair of intertwining red and yellow hearts – looked like the word “Allah” in Arabic, when viewed upside down and backwards.
· Nike pulled more than 38,000 pairs of basketball shoes after the Council on American-Islamic Relations said the logo – the word “air” in flame-like lettering – looked like “Allah” in Arabic, again, when viewed from a certain angle.
· And in 1994, Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld designed a dress incorporating an embroidered pattern copied from Arabic lettering on India’s Taj Mahal monument. He was unaware that the lettering included the phrase “They are the ones who found guidance,” which appears a number of times in the Koran. After wearing the dress on a Paris catwalk, German model Claudia Schiffer received death threats, prompting her mother to make a public plea for her safety.
I remember, when several years ago we were all supposed to throw away our rock ‘n roll albums because if you played them backwards you would hear things like “hmpmth wuloth, kill the kittens, zboeth rontod”. Of course back then I had never heard of a fatwa, I long for the good ‘ole days.
