Re: Is celebrating love not a part of our culture?
Agreed that many taboos need to be eradicated, but I don’t think a commercial occasion like Valentines Day would do any miracles to achieve this.
Its just one day and to be very honest, I feel such occasions very superficial. They are just imposed on the grounds ‘Others are doing that, so lets we do that also’. Not that I’m against expression of love through the means you mentioned in your post, but we need to understand that each culture got different boundaries to cherish relationships. Such boundaries are very much connected with the prevalent religions in those cultures. If we try to adapt a foreign culture, may be our own culture don’t put that much resistance, which our religious values demand rightly or wrongly).
I remember once I had an argument with my friend (though he offers namza 5 times a day, but he is not typical molvi to tag haaza haram, haaza makrroh). He heard some colleague saying that the Prophet was romantic towards his wives and he objected to use word romance with Prophet. When I asked him ‘whats wrong with word romance? Its natural feeling between the spouse / couples’. His reply was ‘I don’t accept this word, as I perceive not in a holy way to be attached with a personality like prophet’. Moral of the story is: We need to be very careful to adapt something which is alien to our society, as both our culture and religion got some restrictions. We need to bring / develop something original to eradicate taboos, rather than borrowing concepts like V-Day.