Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (33 page)

This back-and-forth pattern has been repeated throughout the Middle East, China, and central Asia in recent years, as secular governments attempt to establish discipline and loyalty to the state with shaving decrees, while radical groups press men of all ages to eschew impious razors.
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In recent years, the Iraqi government has required all men in its military and police forces to shave, contributing to resentment among enlistees.
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At the other extreme, the militant Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has instructed its followers to maintain a beard at least two fists in length—longer even than other Islamist groups—to prove their commitment to the cause.
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Civilians are often caught up in this ideological struggle. When the Taliban held Afghanistan under its puritanical rule, cigarettes, television, drinking, and music were all banned. Women were required to cover themselves from head to toe in public, and men were required to keep their hair short but maintain beards of at least four inches. Religious police monitored barbershops to see that this decree was enforced, and residents were warned not to let their hair look like that of an American. After the Taliban defeat in 2001, barbers ran a brisk business, as men lined up to cut off this talisman of oppression. “I’ve got nothing against beards,” one customer explained. “The problem is when someone tells you that you have to have one. That’s why I hated it.”
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The requirement to wear beards has become increasingly important to both Sunni and Shia conservatives for the same reasons it had among Orthodox Jews since the late nineteenth century, as a matter of preserving folkways and identity in the modern world. In Iran, a return to beards was a visible feature of the overthrow of the shah’s secular regime in 1978 and a return to Islamic law. The clamor for religious beards began before that, however. Moroccan scholar Muhammad al-Zamzami, for example, published in 1967 a pamphlet entitled
Clear evidence that he who shaves his beard is cursed, and that his prayers are of no value
.
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Indian scholar Muhammad Zakariya Kandhlawi, similarly angry about seeing young Muslim men shaving in 1970s India, produced a tract entitled
The Beard of a Muslim and Its Importance
, which was later
translated into English and French for the benefit of the faithful living in the West. According to the South African institute that produced the English translation, Kandhlawi’s tract would help “many who desire to uphold Islamic symbols in an anti-Islamic environment.”
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In more recent years, conservative authors from different schools of thought have published similar discourses, which are readily available in translation on the Internet.
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Kandhlawi, al-Zamzami, and other Muslim fundamentalists build their cases around a rich trove of beard references in the Hadith, traditional collections of the sayings and actions of Muhammad.
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Some Hadith simply report that Muhammad commanded men to trim their mustaches while letting their beards grow. Others describe the Prophet’s beard and his practice of cutting it at a fist’s length. Some attest that Muhammad commanded faithful men to trim their mustaches and grow beards so that men might be distinguished from women and the faithful from pagans, Jews, or Christians. Still others describe the Prophet as warning those who failed to follow these rules that they were sinning against God and the faith. Kandhlawi, for one, insists that even barbers who shave others’ beards are sinning.

Some conservative authors provide more practical arguments to bolster ancient authorities. To Kandhlawi in particular, it is clear that Muhammad wished to establish with his grooming regulations a sort of uniform that would help preserve Muslim fidelity. Every religion and nation creates uniforms, flags, and other symbols, he reasons, and any group that loses them will be quickly absorbed into other nations. The preservation of Islam therefore depends on maintaining distinctive traditions, including facial hair.
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As in the case of Orthodox Judaism, the preservation of the symbols of commitment and segregation can lead to conflict with secular states. A notable instance is the laws enacted in France in 2004 forbidding religious displays, potentially including beards, in public schools. On the other hand, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously in January 2015 that a Muslim prisoner in Arkansas had the right to a half-inch beard as a matter of religious expression.
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In the United States, arguments of religious liberty clearly have a better chance of undoing antibeard legal precedents than claims of individual or labor rights. The US military has already made accommodations for some Sikh soldiers,
allowing them their beards and turbans, even as it refuses similar concessions to other groups.
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There will be many such challenges in the years ahead.

A recurring use for facial hair in modern society is to establish a temporary brotherhood, lasting only as long as it takes to complete a goal or mission. This is the quest beard, dramatically exemplified by 2013 Major League Baseball champions the Boston Red Sox.

No one is quite sure why they did it, but baseball fans in Boston are glad they did. At the start of the season, most of the players decided to grow out their beards, not just tidy trimmed ones but untamed manes in whatever form nature permitted. Not coincidentally, in many people’s view, the team’s playing was transformed, allowing it to rise from one of the worst season records in 2012 to become a powerhouse, sweeping aside opponents relatively easily on its march to the championship. On the way, supporters jumped on the bandwagon, wearing T-shirts with beard themes and all manner of real and fake whiskers. One journalist recounted a brief episode of this madness, when he stopped in his car at a traffic light next to another car containing a man, woman, and child, “all of them wearing baseball caps and outfitted with something strange and gray and hideous on their faces.”
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By all accounts, the brotherhood of the beard began at training camp in March, when a few players on a lark decided to stop shaving. Others joined in, sensing that it was a way to bond as teammates.
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A few weeks into the new season, Boston’s famous marathon was struck by homemade terrorist bombs, which killed three and wounded hundreds. The city, including its baseball players, rallied to the slogan “Boston Strong,” and though it was not the inspiration for their beards, the tragedy added a layer of emotional intensity that persisted through the entire season, symbolized by a special “B strong” patch on the team’s uniforms. The success of the Red Sox seemed more important than ever.

The remarkable look and success of Boston’s baseball club inevitably raised questions about these “rally beards.” What were they for, and
how did they work? The most common answer was that they helped the players form a tight bond by sharing a distinctive look. Teammates also created a new form of celebration in which they pulled each other’s beards after a great play. Another explanation of the power of the “basebeards” was that it represented sacrifice and toughness, what star player David Ortiz called a “go-for-broke approach” and “rebellious streak.”
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One psychologist suggested that it triggered a “Samson” factor, projecting hairy warrior strength. Underlying both of these dynamics was a seriousness of purpose, described by a commentator as “a kind of solemnity.”
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It was a combination of social bonding, strength, and purpose that gave the Boston quest beards their power. As one local columnist concluded, “The beard represents all that was good with this team—unity and ruggedness.”
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There was still one more dimension. The team’s supporters had a new means to identify with their team and their city, deploying any sort of wool, string, or marker ink to play along.

Pulling together in common sacrifice and special effort is the hallmark of the quest beard. Players’ wives had to make sacrifices too, patiently waiting for the season to end in order to get their neatly groomed husbands back. The season following their championship, the Red Sox players returned to their previous selves, by and large, having trimmed most if not all of their distinctive hair.
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The seriousness underlying the success of the quest beard is readily visible in another prominent example—“Movember,” an international cause that encourages men to grow a mustache during the month of November to raise awareness of men’s health issues. Technically, this is a quest mustache; beards are not allowed according to the Movember Foundation’s rules. It is the same idea, however. The rules state that one must start the month clean-shaven. In other words, it is explicitly a temporary gesture that, like the playoff beard, symbolically unites a group in a common mission. According to the organization’s official history, a few Australian men came up with the mustache-growing idea in 2003, and only later did they link it to a particular quest—fighting prostate cancer.
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It has worked brilliantly. Movember can boast that in its first decade it has registered over four million people from twenty-two countries who made $559 million in contributions.

By definition, the quest beard is provisional and short-term. There are many bearded and mustachioed men, however, who are in it for the long haul, and not for religious or gender-bending reasons. As contrarians to the norm, they simply see their hair as liberating. Their primary impetus is the expression of autonomy. Nevertheless, as a visible minority, men of the beard often band together for mutual support and admiration in beard clubs and beard contests. Given Germany’s long history as a bastion of facial hair (recall Pastor Schönland, Georg Kirchmaier, Prince Albert, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn, Kaiser Wilhelm, and Paul Breitner), it is unsurprising that the modern World Beard and Mustache Championships has its origins in a German club formed in 1986. Nor is it unexpected that the most the most decorated competitor over the past three decades is a German, Berliner Karl-Heinz Hille (
figure 13.4
). After winning both the “imperial partial beard” category and his second overall title at the Carson City Championship in 2003, Hille, dapper in a shimmering grey tuxedo and top hat, declared rather incongruously that he was “as happy as a pig in mud.”
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Another victory in his category at the 2013 championships in Leinfelden-Echterdingen, Germany, gave him a streak of six straight triumphs and a place in the
Guinness Book of World Records
.
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Beard clubs and competitions are a relatively recent phenomenon, often nostalgic in style but fundamentally quite modern. At one level, they are a response to the decline of fraternal organizations and other traditionally male-dominated bastions, such as labor unions. At another level, they celebrate male dignity in an age of increasing gender equity. Somewhat like the quest beard of the Red Sox, the clubber’s hair is a source of personal and collective pride. The qualities of which these bearded men are most proud are individuality and independence. Gary James Chilton, for example, a contestant at the 2003 World Beard and Mustache Championships, described a bearded man as “open-minded, non-judgmental and a free spirit,” whereas a clean-shaven man is “someone who has been told what to do.”
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There is often talk of expressing one’s authentic self. “I think,” one contestant wrote, “that your face is not your real face if you shave every day.”
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Sociologist
Paul Roof, longtime president of the Holy City Beard and Mustache Society in Charleston, South Carolina, echoed this theme of liberated authenticity in declaring that he finds that men with “beards and the mustaches are the most interesting people at any party.”
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For middle-class professionals in particular—and this is the primary constituency of beard and mustache clubs—social groups are not
a given but must be built around common proclivities and interests. Clubs and contests are an opportunity for men to socialize and engage in community work, along with their spouses and partners. In a sense, beard clubs hope to accomplish over a longer term what the quest beard accomplishes in the short run. Hair becomes a common symbol and the premise for a set of activities that bring people together for common ends. Not that it always works smoothly. From the inception of international competition, there have been intense disputes, splits, and jealousies concerning venues, categories, and judging. A serious rift opened in 2014, when Phil Olsen, the prime mover of Beard Team USA, organized his own world championship in Portland, Oregon, without the approval of the World Beard and Mustache Association.

Beard clubs are the most explicit example of the social uses of facial hair in the postmodern world, though other men’s associations, not built specifically around facial hair, have also made it a key feature of masculine autonomy and socializing. These include the gay subcultures already mentioned, like bears and leathermen, and also motorcycle clubs, which the leathermen emulate. In these contexts, hair works in tandem with other symbols and practices. Motorcycle clubs have established a powerful alliance between facial hair and leather, both evincing toughness and assertiveness to the point of menace. Often times, the medal-studded and hairy men attending gatherings like the annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota are professional men living out a masculine fantasy of liberation, if only for week.

A lot of men want this fantasy. The Sturgis rally, which has its origins in a motorcycle race in 1938, became a cultural phenomenon after Hollywood galvanized the image of the liberated and rebellious biker in
The Wild One
(1954), starring Marlon Brando, and later
Easy Rider
(1969), starring Peter Fonda. From the 1970s onward, the Sturgis rally and other biker gatherings have grown dramatically in Europe as well as North America. The Sturgis event has boasted almost half a million attendees in recent years, many from Europe and other regions, offering powerful testimony of men’s desire to defy the constraints of ordinary life in riding out, bold and bearded, on the open road.

In our times, the cracks in the smooth façade of the shaven norm run in many different directions. Whether gay, straight, liberal, conservative, religious, secular, urban, or rural, men have found reasons
to encourage beards and mustaches to grow. In one sense or another, men have found in facial hair a form of masculine liberation. In a shaven world, it is statement of personal autonomy, but not only that. For consumer-oriented urban men like David Beckham, carefully sculpted beards help bridge the divide between supposedly masculine and feminine qualities, while for other gay and straight men, a furry face clarifies that distinction. Conservative men worried about the dissolution of traditional gender and family norms are experimenting with hairy rebelliousness. For deeply conservative religious communities, including the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and fundamentalist Muslims, ancient laws prescribing long beards are enforced to symbolize a social collective in opposition to secular modernity, including its threat to masculine privilege. For nonreligious groups too, facial hair is a means to bond men with each other in teams, clubs, or causes for the short or long term. The quest beard has proven very popular in recent years because it offers men the option of having it both ways. It marks a special time during which men can escape social rules, join a tight-knit brotherhood, and do something daring and special. Later they can return to the smoother course of their regular lives.