Nike refuses to customize sneakers with 'Muslim' and 'Islam'

Dot Mediano Tuesday, February 16, 2016

A man from New York has been angered after Nike rejected a request to customize a pair of Air Jordans with 'Islam' and 'Muslim'.

Nabeel Kaukab, 40, posted on Facebook Thursday, saying that he was planning to buy a pair of shoes from the sporting footwear company, but was furious when the words 'Islam' and 'Muslim' were disallowed from the NikeiD customization tool. 'Mohammad', 'Zakat', and 'Jihad' were reportedly allowed.

According to the Huffington Post, Kaukab questioned where the words fall under the guidelines stated by Nike in their website. Based on the Nike guidelines, some words are banned for reasons like trademark brands, profanity, inappropriate slang, discrimination to other people, or words that incite violence. He then asked the company on where they thought 'Islam' and 'Muslim' fall under.

He also noted that the company allowed other religious terms like 'Jewish' or 'Hindu' and other infamous names such as 'KKK' (Ku Klux Klan), 'Al Qaeda', 'Osama', 'Pol Pot', 'Dahmer', etc.

'Trump' was also allowed although it clearly violated the intellectual property of the businessman. He justified that his post was meant to clarify what Nike's intentions truly and wanted to clear out the discrepancy.

Nike responded to the issue a day after the post was made, Express Tribune reported. A spokesperson from the company, quickly took the matter at hand and held a meeting with the senior members of the NikeiD team to find out why the words were prevented from appearing.

The representatives said that after the 1997 pull-out of 3,000 pairs of Nike Air shoes from the market because of the stylized design for "Air" closely resembled Allah in Arabic, the company tried to be more culturally sensitive, but resulted in the overlooking of some words. She added that Nike fully accepted the responsibility and immediately took the words out of the banned list. She had also planned to set up multiple discussions to efficiently process which words are unacceptable on NikeiD.