Just as you sometimes see geese flying south even before the weather breaks, it’s the small signs that often portend the larger transformations. And so it is in the Middle East. In late October, reports began to filter out from Mosul that young men were shaving their beards. Styles were changing, not through the world of fashion but rather through the fortunes of war.
In many places, the beard is the sign of the committed jihadist. It’s so common, in fact, that when a family describes their son’s descent into violence, his growing of a beard is often on the checklist of symptoms. He prayed on schedule and without fail, he went on the hajj, he memorized vast sections of the Koran, and he grew his beard. Shaving the beard is the shedding of an identity, done to conceal one’s true nature — or to signal a changing allegiance.
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