’Sorry Valentine’s Day, I’m Muslim!” became the unofficial strapline for a new young generation of Muslims last year. The sentiment was tweeted, facebooked and held up on signs in selfies.
Every year opposition to the festival named after the Christian martyr Valentine continues to grow. He was put to death by the Roman empire for conducting secret marriages for men who were in the army, because Roman law forbade married men from serving. You’d think that a martyr for marriage would be welcomed by Muslims.
The protests against Valentine’s Day focus around both the practices that take part on the day as well as its origins. The moral argument made against it is that it encourages unrealistic and superficial ideas of love, creates an opening for promiscuity and gives permission for illicit love and intimacy. Some Muslim scholars also oppose it claiming it is a festival from outside the fold of Islam being adopted unthinkingly by Muslims who by doing so are shifting their identity towards the proponents of the festival.
I’ve always been an advocate of expressions of love. Love is the defining human emotion. Healthy marriages need both love and intimacy as is clearly described in Islamic teachings.
Sadly, too often love is forgotten or actively excluded from the conversation, which is why I’m an ardent proponent for it to be re-embraced by Muslims. Worse, the expression of love is considered shameful or inappropriate, particularly if women are expressing their aspiration for love or their joy in revelling in love with their husbands.
But I can’t ignore the growing protests about Valentine’s Day. I don’t like the fact that the festival has become less about individual spontaneous expressions of love and more about displaying love through purchasing things.
Love is good, but should not be commodified into whatever format greeting cards manufacturers think is in fashion this year. What’s even worse is that the kind of love espoused in Valentine’s celebrations has become globally homogenous. The cards, balloons and cuddly toys are so cookie cutter, one size fits all. This imposition of what love should look like feels like the ultimate conclusion of cultural imperialism, a westernised cartoon version of love to which the global population must subscribe.
Valentine’s Day goes beyond the kind of cultural imperialism defined by the idea of McDonaldisation, it goes into the very intimate realm of the heart, which is the ultimate arena of colonisation, forcing submission of individual cultures and independent free spirits to abandon their unique and defining experience of love and conform to an outside imposed standard.
The protests to me suggest that this is no longer going to be tolerated and Valentine’s Day has become a watershed for cultures that wish to reclaim pride in their own traditions and are fed up with alien ideas intruding into the most intimate of spaces – the heart and the bedroom.
Don’t sanitise, homogenise and commodify love. Instead, spend this Valentine’s Day making it unique and express your love in a way that’s individual to you.
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed is the author of Love in a Headscarf and blogs at www.spirit21.co.uk
