DAMMAM, 14 August 2007 — A young man here decided he wanted to impersonate a hipster with a big shaggy hair-do by allowing his hair to grow out and out and out until it was a voluminous nest above his brow. Dad didn’t like that too much, but according to a local newspaper, instead of pinning his son down on the bathroom floor and taking clippers to his head he decided to take a more diplomatic approach: He bribed his son SR1,000 to trim his hedgerow. The son accepted. “It was like a mountain was lifted off my shoulder (when he accepted the money),” said the father. “Having hair like that defies our culture.” Perhaps, but anyone who spends some time among Saudi shabab (young men) will notice that some of them really dig the big Angela Davis black-power-afro look from the 1970s and go to great, er, lengths to achieve that volume.
