Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Men with weird hairstyles risk arrest in Saudi

Saudi Arabia’s feared religious police warned men they could be arrested if they are caught in public with a weird hair style deemed against Islamic tenets.

The Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice said it has plans to enter schools next academic year to warn teen age boys against styling their hair in a way that violate tradition in the conservative Gulf Kingdom.

The Commission’s chairman, Abdul Latif Al Sheikh, was reacting to reports about what newspapers described as a widespread phenomenon involving teen age Saudis wearing weird dresses and styling their hair in a bizarre way.

“Hair is a personal thing in which we should not intervene directly,” he said, quoted by the Saudi Arabic language daily Okaz.

“But if the young man wears strange clothes and his hair style violates Islamic tradition and tenets, then he will be stopped…if we find that this boy’s aim is to harass women and hurt the society in a way that will make us a subject of sarcasm among other societies, then we have to prevent and deter him.”

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