No, not these kind of creepy clowns. The creepy bushy-long-beard Muslim kind of creepy clowns.

That’s at least what many young Syrian refugees in Germany think of them. The mosques in Germany give them the heebie-jeebies because many of them “are more conservative than those at home.”

Hello? Germany? That’s your cue.

Hani Salam escaped civil war in Syria and survived the journey from Egypt to Europe. But when he saw men with bushy long beards at a mosque near his current home in Cologne last November, he was worried.

The men’s a ppearance reminded him of Jaish al-Islam, the Islamist rebels who took over his hometown near Damascus, said Salam, 36, who wears a mustache but no beard. One of them told Salam that “good Muslims grow beards, not moustaches,” he recalled – a centuries-old idea that he dismisses.

“One time when I was there, a Salafist asked a young Arab man to leave because he was wearing shorts. At the Turkish mosque no one cares what you’re wearing.”