Top for Allah, bottom for Abdallah
(or)
Top for Ramazan, bottom for Tarazan
–Local Oral Tradition
As with so many other American kids of the late 80s and early 90s, I once sported a mullet. And a curly-haired mullet at that. But hairstyles, as with fashions in general, are surprisingly global in their spread. Just go back and look at pictures of university students in Afghanistan in the 1960s and you’ll see what I mean. This means that mullets also made their way to many of the countries of Central Asia in past decades and are popping up once again, even as they enjoy their controversial return in the West.
I don’t think I’ll ever go back to the haircut I had as a 3-year-old, but I still laughed out loud when I recently heard the local equivalents of the English “Business in the front, party in the back” idiom about this particular hairstyle. The local sayings quoted above are getting at the same thing, though in a very Central Asian way.
In the first saying, the short hair on top and in the front is dubbed “For Allah,” meaning it’s respectful and presentable, even for a religious setting. But the back hair at the bottom of the head is “For Abdullah,” who is probably a 14-year-old working-class kid who has already started smoking and likes to ride on his Chinese motorbike as his mullet trails majestically behind him in the wind.
The first part of the second saying, “For Ramazan” is a local way of referring to Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting and religious rededication. But the second part, “For Tarazan,” refers to none other than the vine-swinging jungle man we know in the West as Tarzan. This carries with it not only the carefree, somewhat rebellious sense of a teenager, but also that there is something hinting at the wild, the barbarian, in the mullet hairstyle. Which is, of course, one reason why young men like it. I remember reading how leather trousers became fashionable at some point among the teenagers of Rome, since only barbarians wore trousers while ‘respectable’ Romans wouldn’t be caught dead in them. A similar thing is going on here, it seems.
I find it hilarious that not only are mullets a global thing, but so is the opinion that they are a most uncanny hairstyle, a mix of things that probably should not have been mixed. The conservative middle class of the West and Central Asia may not agree on everything, but in their quips about mullets, they have surprising common ground.
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Entrusted to the Dirt 