Egyptian sheikh forbids purchasing Chevrolet's because logo looks like a cross



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....