There is no finer mark of a Pakistani man than a fully oiled, waxed and twirled moustache. For 18 years, Amir Muhammad Afridi’s vast handlebar moustache, curling as high as his forehead, made him a celebrity in the rugged, tribal lands that border Afghanistan.
But that was until his luxuriant facial hair came to the attention of Lashkar-i-Islam, extremists who are fighting to impose hardline Sharia in the Khyber agency where Afridi lived.
For the past two years he has braved death threats, intimidation and been forced to flee his home, all for a moustache that demands 30 minutes of grooming every morning. “They arrested me in broad daylight, put me in their car. They took me to a religious scholar who declared the moustache un-Islamic and ordered it removed,” he said. “There was nothing I could do. I was surrounded by guns. If I had resisted I would be dead.”
They set about his moustache, which at that time stretched 12 inches away from his face, reducing it to what Afridi described in a sorrowful voice as “ordinary”. Since then Mr Afridi, 42, has given up his home in the town of Banna and moved his wife and 10 children to the north-western city of Peshawar where he lives anonymously running a small business importing watches. He has regrown his moustache and only now, with violence declining in Peshawar in the past year, is he prepared to speak about the threat to his life.
“I promised myself I would pray for death but would never surrender my moustache,” he said, despite his wife’s protestations. Such was the local pride in the great moustache that officials in Banna paid him about £40 a month to help him maintain it–a significant sum in Pakistan’s tribal belt.
And legend has it that a quarrel within Pakistan’s first family of politics ended with Benazir Bhutto’s brother, Murtaza, shaving off the moustache of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari. However, the moustache is also a target of Islamic extremists. They point to one of the lessons attributed to the Prophet Mohammed: “Act against the polytheists, trim closely the moustache and grow beard.”
Barbers in Peshawar have been threatened or bombed for offering close shaves. Afridi, however, disputes the idea that moustaches are un-Islamic and points to the example of Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second Muslim caliph. He was a renowned wrestler and wore a moustache twisted into points.