Dicing with death for a moustache in Pakistan

Pakistani businessman Malik Amir Mohammad Khan Afridi has been kidnapped, threatened with death, forcibly displaced and lives apart from his family: all because of his enormous moustache.
Impeccably trimmed to 30 inches, Afridi spends 30 minutes a day washing, combing, oiling and twirling his facial hair into two arches that reach to his forehead, defying gravity.
"People give me a lot of respect. It's my identity," said the 48-year-old grandfather in the northwestern city of Peshawar, when asked why he was prepared to risk everything for his whiskers.
"I feel happy. When it's ordinary, no one gives me any attention. I got used to all the attention and I like it a lot," he said.

For centuries, a luxuriant moustache has been a sign of virility and authority on the Indian sub-continent.
But in Pakistan, Islamist militants try to enforce religious doctrine that a moustache must be trimmed, if not shaved off.

So Afridi went from celebrity to prisoner of Lashkar-e-Islam, then a rival and now an ally of the Taliban in the tribal district of Khyber on the Afghan border.
First the group demanded protection money of USD 500 a month. When he refused, four gunmen turned up at his house in 2009.
He says they held him prisoner for a month in a cave and only released him when he agreed to cut it off.

"I was scared they would kill me, so that's why I sacrificed my moustache," he said.
He fled to relative safety in Peshawar. But he grew his facial hair back and in 2012 the threats started again: telephone calls from people threatening to slit his throat.
So he left the Taliban-hit northwest altogether, moving to the Punjabi city of Faisalabad and returning to Peshawar to visit his family only once or twice a month.
"I'm still scared," he says. "I'm in Peshawar to spend Ramadan with my family but most of the time I stay at home and tell people I'm in Faisalabad if they want to meet me," he says.

His only concession is the holy Muslim fasting month, when a free-standing moustache interferes with his daily ablutions and he keeps it smoothed across his face and tucked behind his ears.
It costs USD 150 a month to maintain -- more than a Pakistani teacher can earn -- although he gets a moustache bursary of USD 50 from the home district in the lawless tribal belt he was forced to flee.
The Khyber administration pays anything from USD 10 to USD 60 a month to men with particularly eye-catching moustaches as a symbolic gesture of appreciation for the bravery and virility traditionally associated with such facial hair.