Titanic craze grips Afghans, Leo’s haircut is the rage

KABUL, JAN 27: Amid the privation, destruction and austere Islamic edicts of Afghanistan, the capital’s young men have been lining up for hair cuts to look like the heart-throb hero of the film Titanic. The ruling Taliban, intent on creating the world’s purest Islamic state and contemptuous of almost everything from the West, are not amused. The religious police, who enforce an interpretation ofIslam that includes a ban on shaving, have detained dozens of barbers for trimming the hair of the capital’s youth in the Titanic style, witnesses said.

‘‘We don’t know for sure the precise number of the arrested people, but reportedly they exceed 30 and have been in the jail for over a week now for giving a Titanic hair style,’’ said one barber, who declined to be identified. The Titanic hair style leaves the fringe untrimmed and the back shortly cropped in emulation of the movie’s star, Leonardo DiCaprio. ‘‘The religious police have warned us against the use of Titanic and other Western hair fashions,’’ another barber said. Three years after its release, the worldwide craze for the romantic blockbuster about the ship that sank in the Atlantic after hitting an iceberg has finally swept into Kabul despite a Taliban ban on music, cinema and television. The epic tale of love and disaster has captivated Afghans, who are seeking an escape from their own disaster a Russian invasion in 1979 followed by civil war that has dragged on inconclusively for more than a decade.

The Titanic name is attached to anything an Afghan merchant can sell: cosmetics, clothes, footware, wedding cakes and vehicles. Officials of the Taliban religious police, formally known as the Ministry of Prevention of Vice and Promotion of Virtue, declined to comment to Reuters about the recent arrests, merely insisting that Afghans must not mimic Western ways.

The Ministry acts directly under the order of the Taliban supreme leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, an ascetic one-eyed religious figure who has never been photographed because pictures are also banned.