This story originally appeared in Front Page Magazine.
Today, February 14, is Valentine’s Day, the sacred day that intimate companions mark to celebrate their love and affection for one another.
If you’re thinking about making a study of how couples celebrate this day in a positive and loving manner, the Muslim world and the milieus of the radical Left are not the places you should be spending your time. Indeed, it’s pretty hard to outdo Islamists and “progressives” when it comes to the hatred of Valentine’s Day. And this hatred is precisely the territory on which the contemporary romance between the Left and Islamic Supremacism is formed.
The train is never late: every year that Valentine’s comes around, the Muslim world erupts with ferocious rage, with its leaders doing everything in their power to suffocate the festivity that comes with the celebration of private romance. Imams around the world thunder against Valentine’s every year – and the celebration of the day itself is literally outlawed in Islamic states.
This year, for example, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan has, as always, banned Valentine’s Day for promoting “immorality, nudity and indecency.” Pakistani television and radio stations are disallowed from mentioning the event – because of a court order the Islamabad High Court issued last year. No one in society, from an official level to any public place, can even hint that they might be celebrating, let alone thinking about, the day.
Pakistan views Valentine’s Day as an “insult” to Islam. In the past, Valentine’s Day activities in the Islamic country were disrupted by Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s main religious party, but in recent years the state and courts have involved themselves. Back on Valentine’s Day in Pakistan in 2013, supporters of Jamat-e-Islami took to the streets in Peshawar to vehemently denounce the Day of Love.
Demonizing it as “un-Islamic,” the Muslim protestors shouted that the day had “spread immodesty in the world.” Shahzad Ahmed, the local leader of the student wing of Jamat-e-Islami, declared that the organization would not “allow” any Valentine’s Day functions, warning that if Pakistani law enforcement did not prevent Pakistanis from holding such functions, that the Jamat-e-Islami would stop them “in our own way.” Khalid Waqas Chamkani, a leader in Jamat-e-Islami, calls Valentine’s a “shameful day.”
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