By now we've all seen the clips of the Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at President Bush during a presser over the weekend. And in the aftermath, of course, the media started asking if we should apply some deeper symbolic meaning to the act, as if it were committed with some non-Western kind of anger, a super-duper Arab kind of anger and frustration. Well, U.S. News and World Report sought insight from Arab and Muslim scholars, including Omid Safi, author of The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry. Was USN&WR...