Last night, I watched the 2010 documentary Restrepo by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington about a U.S. Army unit in Afghanistan, and some of the Afghan village elders had dyed their beards orange.

At the gas station in North Hollywood tonight, a young clerk was training a new hire, a 60ish South Asian man with a beard dyed bright orange, presumably with henna.

So, apparently, that’s a thing over much of the Muslim world.

According to CNN in 2015 in an article on the henna craze in Bangladesh:

Some Muslim men told Coppejans their decision was in reference to the Prophet Muhammad, who is believed to have dyed his hair as well. Some men had just returned from Hajj, the annual Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca.

We’re supposed to not stereotype Muslims, but Razib Khan long ago pointed out that jet travel has reduced cultural diversity among Muslims. People with a bit of money make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and when they return they make sure to constantly lord it over their poorer neighbors with references to Meccan ways: Well, when I was in Mecca, we did it this way.

The problem is that the pilgrimage spreads retrograde Saudi ideas all over the Muslim world, some of them even worse than dying your white beard orange.