Ford just got a big boost in the Salafist market. “Egyptian Sheikh: Driving a Chevy is Haram,” by Angie Nasser for Now Lebanon, January 24:
“And I think to myself, what a wonderful world…”
A Salafi sheikh in Egypt has reportedly issued a fatwa that buying [or driving] a Chevrolet vehicle is haram because the American brand’s logo looks like the Christian cross.
In the video below, prominent Egyptian TV presenter Amr Adeeb takes the sheikh’s joke-of-a-fatwa to task, saying, “We”ve reached a really strange place with this.”
“The car’s been around [for a century] and only now did you notice there’s a cross on the car?”
Adeeb also notes that the car is not used or presented as a form of religious iconography: “Do we hold mass for it? Do we pray for it?” And his guest chimes in with a comment about the self-centered nature of the fatwa itself: “As if the people who came up with the logo were thinking that we want to put this special logo on the car just to piss us [Muslims] off?”
The TV presenter concludes, “With all of the problems in Egypt, you”re concerned about the cross?… We”re calling for unity [in the country] and then you come up with [fatwas] like this?”
By the way, there’s actually a few theories going around about the symbolism behind the Chevrolet logo. One common story is that General Motors co-founder William C. Durant copied the design off some wallpaper he saw in a Parisian Hotel. But historian Ken Kaufmann says the logo is actually based on iconography used by the Southern Compressed Coal Company ad for its “Coalettes” logo….
Years of observation of footage suggest Toyota pickups still have the jihadist market cornered. The duplicitous Muslim Brotherhood, for its part, might prefer “Dodge.”