new thread
I got this from ETLHS:
KABUL (Reuters) - The Taleban have started forcibly cutting hair in Kabul in their drive to turn Afghanistan into the world's purest Islamic state.
``We are cutting hair that hangs over the forehead because when you pray it gets in the way of your forehead touching the ground; the devil stands between you and God,'' Maulawi Abdul Rashid Darkasti of the Taleban's religious police told reporters.
Darkasti, armed with a pair of scissors, stood at a traffic circle Tuesday amid piles of severed forelocks.
He stopped buses and cyclists, removing people's hats to check if anyone was hiding offensive amounts of hair.
``We have cut the hair of 56 people already today,'' Darkasti said, his voice ringing with enthusiasm.
He is the head of the religious police -- formally known as the Department for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice -- in southwestern Kabul.
An official decree bans ``English and American haircuts,'' although the definition of what constitutes an English or American haircut remains fuzzy.
To those of you not so familiar with Afghanistan, it might be interesting to know that until very recently, long hair on men has been relatively popular in Afghanistan! To some extent this might derive from the influence of the "hippie invasion" that afflicted the country in the years around 1970, but on the other hand there is a centuries-old tradition of long hair among the Afghans, partly preserved by members of mystical brotherhoods, i. e. sufis and wandering dervishes, partly remainders of pre-Islamic customs, especially in remote mountainous areas like Nuristan (in the NE of Afghanistan).
This Taliban crackdown on long-haired men just illustrates once more the stone-age obscurantism and bigotry of these abroad-financed ultra-fundamentalists, as well as their alienation from genuine Afghan traditions...
See you in Khyberspace!
Yadgar Achakzai, the Virtual Afghan
also reachable under yadgar@poyadgar.link-gl.de