JAFFA, Israel – A video showing Palestinian students dancing on campus has sparked controversy on social media.
The video, showing men and women dancing the traditional Debka side by side, received more than 1.5 million views and thousands of comments in less than a day. Watch the video here.
Conservatives accused the management of Ramallah’s Birzeit University for condoning “moral abandon” and criticized the “shameful sight” as promoting “promiscuity and forbidden lust.”
Others said the organizers of the event were aiding and abetting prostitution, quoting Prophet Mohammed: “It is better for you to be stabbed in the head with an iron needle than to touch the hand of a woman who is not permissible to you.”
Secular students, conversely, claimed that it is the expression of civil liberties and that the dance was not disrespectful to women, to which some detractors replied: “The essence of Islam is to prevent mixture of genders because it may arouse passions. Those who seek to respect the principles of Allah and his Prophet cannot be described as primitive.”