ISIS would behead them first.

Via Yahoo News:

These days most guys who grow long, bushy beards get labeled as hipsters trying to morph into microbrewing lumberjacks from the 1890s. But the laughing wink and nod folks give to the hairy, Portlandia-style stereotype isn’t always extended when the men growing the beards are Muslim—or perceived to be Muslim.

Now, two ministers in predominantly Muslim areas of London are being praised by a prominent Church of England official for growing beards to signal solidarity across ethnic and religious lines in the community.

“Two of the most energetic priests in east London [have] recently grown beards of an opulence that would not have disgraced a Victorian sage,” the bishop of London, Richard Chartres, wrote in an op-ed in The Church Times on Friday. “The two priests work in parishes in Tower Hamlets. Most of the residents are Bangladeshi-Sylheti, for whom the wearing of a beard is one of the marks of a holy man. This view is shared among many Eastern cultures, but it was not so for much of the history of the West,” Chartres wrote.

The priests’ “desire to reach out to the culture of the majority of their parishioners can only be applauded, ” he wrote.

In an interview on Friday with The Telegraph, one of the priests, the Reverend Adam Atkinson, who is the vicar of St. Peter’s church, explained that 85 percent of the people who live in the vicinity of his parish are Muslim.

“In our area there are three main groups, the poor, the ‘cool’ and the Muslims,” said Atkinson. He went on to note that “beards cover at least two groups reasonably well.”