Down With Love

Submitted by J. Keen Holland (United States), Feb 17, 2004 at 16:32

As a Christian who finds Valentine's Day at best annoying and at worst mildly offensive, I can't imagine why anyone would expect Muslim countries to adopt this new holiday without considerable controversy. Actually, this article begins on a highly positive note: in Pakistan there was a woman in a university classroom. And there's more good news in the fourth paragraph, where we learn that Saudi religious police refrain from arresting women for wearing red clothing on the other 364 days of the year.

In fact, rejection of Valentine's Day may open up a whole new dimension for agreement across cultures since Hindu as well as Muslim religious leaders in South Asia are rejecting the custom at the same time it is being banned by some secular school authorities in the US.

On a more serious note, in a country where armed men invade a church and murder Christians and hardly anyone cares, I am not going to waste a lot of concern on some triviality that leads college boys to engage in fisticuffs.

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