Soccer has always been a window into how the world works. It's played by just about every culture on the planet, and though the rules of the game itself don't change, everything around it does. So it's fascinating for someone of a Western perspective to step into a story like this: the ultra-conservative, Wahhabism-practicing kingdom of Saudia Arabia had their sports authorities stop a match on Friday to cut a player's hair because they deemed it "anti-Islamic," Daily Mail reports.The website arriyadiyah.com reported that the head of Saudi Arabia's youth program asked its sport federations and Olympic committee to "ban the qazaa phenomenon," a reference to the fanciful haircuts donned by hotshot soccer players. Apparently, the head of the youth program was concerned about young people catching on to the latest craze and abandoning their Islamic values.Here's a line from the Daily Mail piece:
It's hard to see in the video, but apparently the player was sporting some kind of low-slung mohawk which irked officials. So they administered a team of stylists with athletic tape scissors to give the guy an on-field trim. It's just our job to sip some tea and watch it all from the sidelines.Such haircuts are against Islam and Saudi traditions, one commentator wrote in the newspaper Al-Jazirah on Friday, urging the football federation to "impose sanctions" on offending players whose "bizarre haircuts are imitated by their fans in schools".