A viral video of a soccer player from Saudi Arabia getting his hair cut in the middle of a game to make it "more Islamic" is at least a few years old.
But news agencies around the world--from The Daily Mail to Agence France-Presse--ran stories suggesting the video had been filmed earlier this week.
The video appears to be from 2012. In it, a soccer game between two Saudi Arabian teams is paused for an hour so that goalkeeper Waleed Abdullah can get his hair clipped by a referee.
Abdullah's haircut was deemed to have violated an Islamic hadith on haircuts that display "al-Qiza," a style of haircut where part of the hair is shaved and other parts remain long.
You can watch the video here:
In a separate Saudi soccer match that took place on Saturday, three players were banned from the match because of their haircuts. The head of a youth group in Saudi Arabia asked the country's sport federations on Tuesday to ban "the Al Qiza phenomenon," according to Arriyadiyah.com.
--Hunter Stuart
