TO DON shoes, to doff them, or even to throw them at somebody? As with all the fundamentals of human life, religion has things to say about the question. And as Edna Nahshon, a professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York explained to me, the message is mixed. The Hebrew scriptures tell us that when the children of Israel were about to make their flight from Egypt, they were told to put shoes on their feet, and this sturdy footwear miraculously held together throughout their journey. But at the moment of his encounter with God, Moses was ordered to take off his shoes because he was treading on sacred ground (pictured). In similar circumstances, Joshua received a similar injunction. The fathers of the early Christian church were intrigued by the instruction to Moses. They thought shoes reflected decay and mortality, because they were made from the skin of dead animals, while God was calling Moses to a richer form of life.
In the Muslim world, removing one's shoes on entering a mosque is one of the basics of religious practice. Pig-leather shoes can never be worn. But all shoes are dirty in more than the literal sense. That's why throwing a shoe is considered a particularly contemptuous form of protest. The latest person to experience that was Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistani president who is now on trial on multiple charges, and had to dodge a flying shoe on the way to court on Friday. George W. Bush had a similar adventure in Iraq in December 2008, and shoe protests have grown more popular since then.
Ms Nahshon, author of a book called "Jews and Shoes", reckons that in respect of footwear, Muslims and Jews sometimes copied one another and sometimes consciously differentiated their practices. One tradition holds that the prophet Muhammad initially encouraged his followers to pray with shoes on, because that was in contrast with Jewish practices of the day. He was then angelically inspired to tell his followers to remove their footwear. Since then, Jews in many parts of the world have been praying with shoes on; indeed an early form of Jewish morning prayer includes special supplications to be said when donning one's footwear: the right shoe first and then the left. But in Arab countries and further east, there is much evidence of Jewish barefootedness. In some cases, Jews were compelled to remove their shoes, at least when treading near a mosque; such rules existed in Morocco and Yemen. In Islamic theocracies, regulations governing clothing and footwear were often used to mark Christians and Jews as monotheists of a lower status. But Ms Nahshon, who is also a senior associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, notes that there is an old formal family photograph of Indian Jews wearing gorgeous clothes, and nothing on their feet (pictured). That, she thinks, reflects not compulsion but a Jewish custom, one that may recall the bare-footedness of the beautifully robed priests in the Jerusalem temple.
Pastor Walt, an evangelical Christian preacher based in Tennessee, declares on his webpage that he has strong likes and dislikes in respect of footwear: "flipflops" imply a deplorable sort of ambivalence, while the best shoes of all are the "combat boots" needed by those who have "put on the whole armour of God" as Saint Paul recommends. But Pope Francis has more modest ideas about what to put on his feet. During his first encounter with journalists, one of the first things they noticed was that he had swapped his predecessor's bespoke red-leather numbers for an ordinary black pair.
There is also some footwear specially designed for atheists, but they may have trouble getting it delivered to Tennessee. I'm grateful to my fellow blogger Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life, for pointing out some of the recent findings of a shop in Berlin which sells "atheist shoes" by mail order. The store did an experiment to see whether packages sent to American addresses arrived more slowly, or were more likely to be lost, if the wrapping revealed the non-religious leanings of the sender. The finding was positive. In some parts of the world, people of no faith have to tread carefully.