Puma Paranoia

A pair of shoes made by Puma have been alleged to contain the name of Allāh written on them in Arabic causing people to get angry and to demand that the shoes be taken down from store shelves and withdrawn from the market.

Sound familiar? It probably does.. Not so long ago some Muslims in the USA were alleging the same about a pair of Nike shoes. They caused quite a stir in the media and ended up with Nike pulling the shoes and promising Muslims to never make the mistake again.

Puma it seems didn’t take the same lesson that Nike did. They have gone and made some shoes bearing what resembles the name of Allāh written in Arabic on them, or at least that’s what some Muslims are again claiming..
Let’s be honest with ourselves, some Muslims really do have quite the imaginations. Let’s take a look at the ’offending’ pair of shoes -

Now if you can’t read Arabic, you can take my word for it that the text in red does slightly resemble the Arabic word Allāh written in a stylised script, but what it really looks like to me is the English word ‘cool‘.
Is it really that hard to see or am I just an eagle-eyed fanatic?
Or now that I think about it, it almost resembles the Estrangelo Aramaic word ‘Lashu‘, and it might pass for the Hebrew ‘Vassi’ and if you put it in a mirror it looks like the Amharic ‘Namu‘.
How can I be so certain that what is written is none of the above? It is because every other word written on the shoe is not in Aramaic,  Hebrew or Amharic, but rather in English. Common sense dictates that therefore of all the languages to choose from, English would be the right one.
As can be seen in the image on the word that clearly says ‘you’ just below the blue circle, the letter o has an open top just like in the word cool. The font used on the shoe makes it a little bit less clear than ususal but the word is still as clear as daylight. One needn’t be a language scholar to make out the word cool on the shoe.

The anger of some people about finding a word which resembles the name of Allāh on a shoe is only surpassed by the fascination with finding similar writings on a plethora of obscure objects. Take a look for example at ‘Allāh’ written on -
a Rock, a Leaf, a Tomato, an Eggplant, a Bean, Aurora Borealis

Sometimes its worth admitting the obvious, as fun as it might be to have your 2 minutes of fame as being the one who exposed the ’secret threat’ of shoe manufacturers’ evil plot to discredit Islamic symbols. Let the shoes be, let’s show people that Muslims are logical, not just overly-emotional.

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