Placing aside the quagmire that is Zionism and the nefarious destination of the profits eked from our sticky caffeine-hungry palms every morning, I’m on the fence when it comes to Starbucks.

Try as I may to avoid it, I cannot help but collapse into a salivating heap over a darn good muffin; throw in a frappucino that has extra drizzle and I will succumb to a syrup-hazed stupor.

Inevitably, any foray to Starbucks is fraught with guilt (how could I be so weak!), condemnation (is this strawberry sauce on my hands or blood in a Lady Macbethian moment?), and self-justification.

Somewhere in the midst of this moral struggle I endeavour divert my inner conscience by staring at the logo and musing where it came from.

Ponder no more, for the Egyptian cleric Safwat Higazi has cracked it:

Has any of you ever wondered who this woman with a crown on her head is? The girl in the Starbucks logo is Queen Esther. Do you know who Queen Esther was and what the crown on her head means? This is the crown of the Persian kingdom. This queen is the queen of the Jews. She is mentioned in the Torah, in the Book of Esther. The girl you see is Esther, the queen of the Jews in Persia.

Esther was one of the seven girls brought before King Xerxes in the palace. When Esther, who was very beautiful, was shown to King Xerxes, she captured his heart, and he chose her to be his queen. He placed a crown on her head, and the crown you see here is the crown of the kingdom of Xerxes, and this is Esther, who became Queen of Persia, instead of Queen Vashti.

Can you believe that in Mecca, Al-Madina, Cairo, Damascus, Kuwait, and all over the Islamic world there hangs the picture of beautiful Queen Esther, with a crown on her head, and we buy her products? [...] It is inconceivable that in Mecca and Al-Madina, there will be a picture of Queen Esther, the queen of the Jews.

Of course, the cleric is offering but one version of the lady-on-the-cup’s origin, for she is in fact a Siren, a mermaid, or to be more exact, a two-tailed mermaid known as a Melusine.

Over at Dead Programmer’s Cafe there is an interesting analysis of the evolution of the Starbucks logo, how it was altered to cover the mermaid’s naughty bits, and why it is making a comeback.

If only the cleric knew: his source of vitriol is less the Queen of the Jews, and more a scantily clad nautical floozy.

That could provide at least a month’s worth of expostulatory fodder…