As soon as the images showed Saddam Hussein’s statue starting to topple, shoes came off in triumphant fashion all over Iraq.

The first time I saw this intriguing custom on TV was when the coalition forces had penetrated one of Saddam’s strongholds in southern Iraq. As a U.S. soldier tried to tear a large poster of Saddam from the wall of a building, a local Iraqi man quickly shimmied up beside him, took off his sandal, and began using it gleefully to pepper the despot’s picture.

“Look at me,” he seemed to be saying to the camera that captured his moment of jubilation. “I am smacking Saddam right on the nose with the sole of my shoe. This is how much I hate the evil man.”

In the last several days, the curious scene has been played out countless times on TV and in the newspapers to the puzzlement of Americans. The people of Basra, Kirkuk, Karbala, Baghdad – all of them flogging away with footwear on the Saddam statuary and other of his likenesses. Sandals, loafers, sneakers, and even the Iraqi version of beach flip-flops have been hurled at Saddam’s image or used as weapons to hammer on the severed metal head from fallen statues of the vanquished oppressor.

Most of us can recall the scenes of freedom-loving people beating the Berlin Wall to rubble with sledgehammers, tire irons, chisels and other heavy metal objects. We saw the same Eastern bloc measures applied to the crumpled statues of Ceaucescu. But not until now have Westerners been treated to a widespread, delirious display of a fallen tyrant being sandal-whipped by the people once under his thumb.

Curious, I called Henry Munson, an anthropology professor at the University of Maine and an expert on Islamic culture, and asked him what the deal was with the shoes.

“Hitting someone with your shoes would be a way to degrade the person,” Munson said. “In the Muslim world, shoes worn in public accumulate dirt and animal excrement and other unclean things on their soles. People generally take off their shoes before entering a home or a mosque, so hitting the statues of Saddam with them would be considered a big insult.”

According to a recent story in The Wall Street Journal, in fact, even exposing the sole of your shoe to another person is the cultural equivalent of giving him the finger. Across the Middle East, the sole of a shoe is considered to be a symbol of the vilest impurity. In India, the effigies of unpopular leaders often are strung with shoes as they are paraded through the streets. Shoes are used to beat thieves, prostitutes and other assorted riffraff of Muslim society.

The shoe as a tool of degradation is a concept that reaches throughout the Arab world and into the Indian subcontinent. In societies where public hygiene is poor, people customarily remove their shoes whenever they enter a house as a means of keeping impurities, symbolic or otherwise, from fouling the place. So when Iraqis slap Saddam with the soles of their shoes, as I’ve learned, they are essentially walking across his face with the most unclean part of an unclean thing.

As a freedom-loving person myself, I am thinking of sending a package to Iraq to show my solidarity to the newly liberated people there. The box would contain a pair of my teenage son’s nasty old sneakers, the foulest footwear known to man. Inside would be a note asking the recipient to make the most potent anti-Saddam statement in all of Baghdad and to throw in a couple of good whacks for me, too.