I first heard of this last year and thought it was a fluke, but now it's happened again. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has banned the celebration of Valentine's Day. Yes, you read that right. A holiday dedicated to honoring and celebrating love, especially romantic love, is verboten in the Kingdom. And to make sure every Saudi got the point, the Kingdom's police confiscated every item, every product, in the nation's stores that was connected in any way to the heinous holiday. Still, many love struck Saudis risked the wrath of the religious police to buy tokens of love for their significant others. Red roses, now contraband, were selling at very high prices for days before today.
Can you imagine? Roses as contraband?! Forget drugs! Forget porno movies! It's those damn roses that are destroying the Kingdom's morals!
What accounts for this absurd policy in the Kingdom? Well, last year the explanation was that Valentine's Day was a Western holiday and its celebration in Saudi Arabia was an unacceptable encroachment of Western Christian culture into the birthplace of Islam. I didn't believe that last year and I don't believe it now. I think the real problem with Valentine's Day is that Saudi officialdom's fanatical brand of Islam is just antithetical to love. Don't think so? Then consider this.
If Saudi Islam is opposed to Western cultural celebrations of love, but not to love itself, then why ban Valentine's Day? Why not just Islamize it? Why not call February 14 Aisha's Day, after Mohammed's favorite wife? On that day Saudi men could buy gifts rooted in Islamic culture and faith and give them to their wives to show they loved them as much as Mohammed was said to love Aisha. The Kingdom could even use Aisha's Day to counter the "stereotype" that Islam, especially its brand of Islam, is a misogynist faith. And changing Valentine's Day to Aisha's Day wouldn't be totally unprecedented. In the past Islam had no problem turning Christian churches into mosques, so changing a Christian holiday into an Islamic one shouldn't be hard or distasteful. This would be the best solution to the Valentine's Day "problem"...if the Kingdom's faith believed in love. It doesn't.
Saudi Arabia is ruled by the fanatically puritanical and fundamentalist version of Islam called Wahhabism. This faith can't stomach a celebration of love, whatever its origin, because it can't stomach love itself. For Saudi officialdom, love is the real problem, not Valentine's Day.
Only in the Kingdom, and I don't mean the magic one.
5 comments:
great post. I would love to follow you on twitter.
Hey Anonymous. Glad you like my post, but I don't do Twitter, sorry. But keep stopping by here, I'll add new posts as much as I can.
Great post my friend. You have hit the nail right on the head with this one. Keep up the great work here.
thanks hun for droppin in at WHT!..hugs!
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