All Malaysians
including Muslims should be allowed to celebrate Valentine ’s Day, Datuk Seri
Nazri Aziz said today. He was asked to comment on Islamic affairs minister
Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom saying that Islamic religious authorities have
launched nationwide enforcement efforts to nab Muslims celebrating Valentine’s
Day today. “Why can’t it be celebrated? I disagree...it is not a form of
prayer,” said the de-facto law minister. “What is wrong with Valentines’ day?
People just want to express their love to one another. “How different is it
from other days, where we can do the same thing?” Nazri asked. He also
criticised PAS for campaigning against Valentines’ Day, saying that such
efforts were plain “ridiculous”.
Last Friday,
official sermons also warned Muslims against celebrating Valentine’s Day, which
the federal Islamic authorities claimed was in breach of the tenets of their
religion.
I strongly disagree
with the Hon. Minister Nazri. Please read on to see why I think Valentine’s Day
celebration is not for Muslims.
I did some
research on the web (I know, don’t believe everything you read on the net but
that is the quickest way) and I copied and pasted below a brief introduction on
Valentine’s Day.
The history of
Valentine's Day--and the story of its patron saint--is shrouded in mystery. We
do know that February has long been celebrated as a month of romance, and that
St. Valentine's Day, as we know it today, contains vestiges of both Christian
and ancient Roman tradition. But who was Saint Valentine, and how did he become
associated with this ancient rite?
The Catholic
Church recognizes at least three different saints named Valentine or
Valentinus, all of whom were martyred. One legend contends that Valentine was a
priest who served during the third century in Rome. When Emperor Claudius II
decided that single men made better soldiers than those with wives and
families, he outlawed marriage for young men. Valentine, realizing the
injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for
young lovers in secret. When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius
ordered that he be put to death.
Other stories
suggest that Valentine may have been killed for attempting to help Christians
escape harsh Roman prisons, where they were often beaten and tortured.
According to one legend, an imprisoned Valentine actually sent the first
"valentine" greeting himself after he fell in love with a young
girl--possibly his jailor's daughter--who visited him during his confinement.
Before his death, it is alleged that he wrote her a letter signed "From
your Valentine," an expression that is still in use today. Although the
truth behind the Valentine legends is murky, the stories all emphasize his
appeal as a sympathetic, heroic and--most importantly--romantic figure. By the
Middle Ages, perhaps thanks to this reputation, Valentine would become one of
the most popular saints in England and France.
Origins of
Valentine's Day: A Pagan Festival in February
While some
believe that Valentine's Day is celebrated in the middle of February to
commemorate the anniversary of Valentine's death or burial--which probably
occurred around A.D. 270--others claim that the Christian church may have
decided to place St. Valentine's feast day in the middle of February in an
effort to "Christianize" the pagan celebration of Lupercalia.
Celebrated at the ides of February, or February 15, Lupercalia was a fertility
festival dedicated to Faunus, the Roman god of agriculture, as well as to the
Roman founders Romulus and Remus.
To begin the
festival, members of the Luperci, an order of Roman priests, would gather at a
sacred cave where the infants Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, were
believed to have been cared for by a she-wolf or lupa. The priests would
sacrifice a goat, for fertility, and a dog, for purification. They would then
strip the goat's hide into strips, dip them into the sacrificial blood and take
to the streets, gently slapping both women and crop fields with the goat hide.
Far from being fearful, Roman women welcomed the touch of the hides because it
was believed to make them more fertile in the coming year. Later in the day,
according to legend, all the young women in the city would place their names in
a big urn. The city's bachelors would each choose a name and become paired for
the year with his chosen woman. These matches often ended in marriage.
Valentine's Day:
A Day of Romance
Lupercalia
survived the initial rise of Christianity and but was outlawed—as it was deemed
“un-Christian”--at the end of the 5th century, when Pope Gelasius declared
February 14 St. Valentine's Day. It was not until much later, however, that the
day became definitively associated with love. During the Middle Ages, it was
commonly believed in France and England that February 14 was the beginning of
birds' mating season, which added to the idea that the middle of Valentine's
Day should be a day for romance.
The celebration
of Saint Valentine didn't have any romantic connotations until Chaucer's poetry
about "Valentines" in the 14th century.
Popular modern
sources link unspecified Greco-Roman February holidays alleged to be devoted to
fertility and love to St. Valentine's Day, but prior to Chaucer in the 14th
century, no links between the Saints named Valentinus and romantic love
existed. Earlier links as described above were focused on sacrifice rather than
romantic love. In the ancient Athenian calendar the period between mid-January
and mid-February was the month of Gamelion, dedicated to the sacred marriage of
Zeus and Hera.
In Ancient Rome,
Lupercalia, observed February 13–15, was an archaic rite connected to
fertility. Lupercalia was a festival local to the city of Rome. The more
general Festival of Juno Februa, meaning "Juno the purifier "or
"the chaste Juno", was celebrated on February 13–14. Pope Gelasius I
(492–496) abolished Lupercalia.
Source: Jack B.
Oruch, "St. Valentine, Chaucer, and Spring in February" Speculum 56.3
(July 1981:534–565)
The Parliament
of Fowls by Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400)is perhaps the first St.
Valentine's Day poem ever written. Brewer suggests that it was begun in May of
1382 and finished for Valentine's day in 1383.
A garden saw I, full of blossomy boughs
Upon a river, in a green mead,
There as sweetness evermore enough is,
With flowers white, blue, yellow, and red,
And cold well-streams, nothing dead,
That swimming full of small fishes light,
With fins red and scales silver bright.
On every bough the birds heard I sing,
With voice of angels in their harmony;
Some busied themselves birds forth to
bring;
The little coneys to here play did hie.
And further all about I could see
The dread filled roe, the buck, the hart
and hind,
Squirrels, and beasts small of gentle kind.
Of instruments of strings in accord
Heard I so play a ravishing sweetness,
That God, that maker is of all and lord,
Had heard never better, as I guess.
Therewith a wind, scarcely it might be
less,
Made in the leaves green a noise soft
Accordant to the fowls' song aloft.
Th'air of that place so a-temperate was
That never was grievance of hot nor cold.
There wax also every wholesome spice and
grass;
No man may there wax sick nor old;
Yet was there joy more a thousandfold
Than man can tell; never would it be night,
But always clear day to any man's sight.
So, from the
debatable evidence presented above we can see that Valentine’s Day is a
Christianised celebration as much as Thaipusam is Hindu and Wesak is Buddhist. I
have no doubt that Valentine’s Day is a quasi religious festival of the
Christians and it is my opinion that people of other faiths should not partake
in it.
You don’t see
any non-Muslims celebrating Maulidul Rasul or Isra’ Mikraj do you?
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