Over on the socknitters yahoo group, folks were in quite a tizzy over a discussion about reproducing some socks that are patterned in a book which include Arabic writing that spells out Allah. Naturally, Muslims would find this offensive, like Jews, there are rules governing the writing of the name of God. Placing it on the bottom of ones foot to be trodden upon all day would fall into the list of things ya just don’t do. This makes complete sense to me, and when the subject came up, I thought to myself that a recreation could be made without offense by replacing Allah with some vertical stripes or even another word. Someone mentioned the word salaam which would still look nice, without offending. I really like this idea.

The thing that upset me about this thread was that it degenerated into an argument over Jews not spelling out God’s name. Considering that the name of his son is plastered on the back of car bumpers and windows, hanging from keychains and on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs and questions such as WWJD (that’s Do or Drive, now) it doesn’t surprise me at all that people don’t know about this custom. But jeez, I’m not Jewish and I knew about it How sad that there are people who never interact with anyone different from themselves all their life! Or even worse, that they could know about someone else’s customs, but decide that their own are better and that they should disregard everything that they were taught because someone on the internet knows what God feels.

Not that our ::cough:: Leader ::cough:: is setting any better an example.
And the worst part? I am on digest, so it was all over before I even got a chance to rant on the list. The listmom had a mailbox full of complaints so the list went moderated. Going an telling mommy? I mean, aren’t we all (mostly) adults?