The Dark Origins of Valentine’s Day Muslims Might Be Unaware Of

[AMusee]

Celebrating Valentine’s Day was strictly forbidden in Saudi Arabia for a long time, up until five years ago:

The change came after Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman stripped the nation’s Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a department once charged with enforcing strict religious norms, of many of its powers in 2016.
Before that, people who dared to celebrate the holiday were often arrested, and shop owners were prevented from selling Valentine’s Day goods.

And as much as this was just one of many moves employed to liberalize an Islamic society, they actually tried to justify this change to make it seem more appealing. Here is a statement from Ahmed Qasim Al-Ghamdi, the former president of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Makkah:

“All these are common social matters shared by humanity and are not religious issues that require the existence of a religious proof to permit it,” he said.
Describing love as a natural feeling, the cleric said that Valentine’s Day celebrated “a positive aspect of the human being.”

Is this claim true? Is this really not a religious matter and does this event really pertain to a positive aspect of the human being?

For this we need to look at the history of Valentine’s Day, which historians agree are the mashed versions of two separate historical events, one involving a Christian priest, and the other about the pagan festival of Lupercalia. This article will focus on the latter:

Unlike Valentine’s Day, however, Lupercalia was a bloody, violent and sexually charged celebration awash with animal sacrifice, random matchmaking and coupling in the hopes of warding off evil spirits and infertility.

This vile festival was celebrated annually on February 15, just one day after the modern day Valentine’s Day is. It was originally known as Februa, which means “Purifications” or “Purgings,” which is the basis for the name of the month February.

It would begin by a bunch of Roman priests called Luperci gathering in a specific place, for example in the cave of Lupercal. These Luperci would then sacrifice a goat and dog, obviously in the name of their own false deities. The sacrifice of the goat was supposed to symbolize fertility.

RELATED: The Unintended Consequences of Celebrating Kafir Holidays

Using the blood-stained knife that was used to sacrifice these animals, the foreheads of two young naked Luperci would then be smeared with blood. It’s this red blood that is the symbolic origin of the color that Valentine’s Day is now popularly associated with. The blood would then be wiped off using wool soaked in milk. And all the while, these Luperci would laugh maniacally.

The goat’s hide would be cut up into strips called thongs. Using these thongs, the Luperci would then wildly run around town, whipping any and all women that were encountered. This was, again, meant as a symbol of fertility. It’s believed that these women would welcome this whipping in hopes of becoming fertile. However, there are historical accounts that this part of the ritual wouldn’t always be so consensual:

Hopkins claims that a mosaic featuring a Lupercalia celebration features “two men forcibly holding a naked woman face upwards, while a third man, half naked, whips her thighs … The men’s drunken hilarity is matched by the beaten woman’s obvious pain.”

The ‘romantic’ ritual would end with young men and women pairing up. In other words, this was a night of fornication.

What a messed up ritual that is the source of the event that people now celebrate globally, including some Muslims.

The merging of this festival with the story of Saint Valentine, which many people nowadays think is the primary origin of this occasion, was most likely a move by the Catholic Church to make Christianity more appealing to pagans, just like how the pagan festival of Saturnalia was merged with the birth of Jesus Christ into the formation of Christmas.

RELATED: Muslims, Before Celebrating Christmas, Think About What You’re Really Doing

This echoes of how many Compassionate Imams these days sugar coat and cherry pick Islam in order to make it more palatable for the kuffar, a move meant to induce acceptance of Muslims by these disbelievers. What they don’t understand is that this only leads to the distortion of Islam:

Never will the Jews or Christians be pleased with you, until you follow their faith. Say, “Allah’s guidance is the only ˹true˺ guidance.” And if you were to follow their desires after ˹all˺ the knowledge that has come to you, there would be none to protect or help you against Allah. (Quran 2:120)

Imagine such a disgusting ritual being described as ‘a positive aspect of the human being’. After learning the dark pagan history of Valentine’s Day, I pray that we will abstain from celebrating it and follow the advice of our Prophet ﷺ:

Ibn ’Umar (RAA) narrated that the Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said:
“He who imitates any people (in their actions) is considered to be one of them.” Related by Abu Dawud and Ibn Hibban graded it as Sahih.

RELATED: The Problem with “Compassionate” Preaching of Islam

https://muslimskeptic.com/2022/02/14/the-dark-origins-of-valentines-day-muslims-might-be-unaware-of/

 

[AMusee]

It’s Not Just Christmas! How Christianity Adopts Paganism for Valentine’s Day​

Another “celebration” of Valentine’s Day now complete, a sort of capitalistic ritual where people consume even more than they do usually, all of that in the name of “love.”

The National Retail Federation (NRT), the world’s largest retail trade association, estimates that people may spend up to $23.9 billion. Not a bad haul for consumer capitalism.

But, as Muslims, we have our own standards, which aren’t limited to economic profits: indeed, we should be aware of what celebrating such a holiday, with all its history and symbols, implies for our religion.

RELATED: The Unintended Consequences of Celebrating Kafir Holidays

The Pagan Origins​

As with pretty much everything in Christianity, from festivities to theology, Valentine’s Day has an obvious pagan genealogy.

Journalist Sydney Combs writes for National Geographic that:

The earliest possible origin story of Valentine’s Day is the pagan holiday Lupercalia. Occurring for centuries in the middle of February, the holiday celebrates fertility. Men would strip naked and sacrifice a goat and dog. Young boys would then take strips of hide from the sacrificed animals and use it to whip young women, to promote fertility.
Lupercalia was popular and one of the few pagan holidays still celebrated 150 years after Christianity was legalized in the Roman Empire.
When Pope Gelasius came to power in the late fifth century he put an end to Lupercalia. Soon after, the Catholic church declared February 14 to be a day of feasts to celebrate the martyred Saint Valentine.
Noel Lenski, a historian at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Lupercalia was “clearly a very popular thing, even in an environment where the Christians are trying to close it down.” In an interview with NPR Lenski theorizes that the feast was meant to replace Lupercalia. “So there’s reason to think that the Christians might instead have said, okay, we’ll just call this a Christian festival,” he said.

So, we have the usual Christian story: compromising with shirk instead of fighting it.

RELATED: Siding with Paganism: Judaism and Christianity Against Islam

After such Christian appropriation, this pagan festival will also be re-branded as something “romantic” by the poets of pre-modern England, from Chaucer to Shakespeare.

​

…Who Was St. Valentine, Anyway?​

As usual with Christians, uncertainty perpetually shrouded this festival, beginning with the very “saint” after which it was named and in the name of whom they justify the celebrations.

We read in a work as authoritative as the Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 15, p. 254, under the pen of Johann Peter Kirsch in 1913:

At least three different Saint Valentines, all of them martyrs, are mentioned in the early martyrologies under date of 14 February.

So, one date for three saints, perhaps another form of the trinitarian approach…

RELATED: The Evolution of the Trinity Doctrine in Christian Theology

The Eastern-Orthodox Church interestingly doesn’t celebrate this saint on the 14th of February, and has two dates for two different St. Valentines: July 6 and July 30.

But how can the Christians be so mistaken about their “saints,” Catholics having more than 10,000 of them, to the extent that many have the same death date?

Well, because these “saints” might just have never existed to begin with.

Candida Moss is an English historian and herself a Roman-Catholic who served as professor at the University of Notre Dame, in the US, recognized as the best Catholic institution of higher learning in the Americas.

So, this is the last person you could accuse of some sort of anti-Christian agenda.

Yet she created some controversy because of her 2013-book, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom.

The title says it all: Moss accuses later Christian historians of having exaggerated the Roman persecution of the early Christian believers, to the extent of inventing martyrdom stories and even saints.

It concerns our topic of St. Valentine as well.

She writes in the introduction:

There’s almost no evidence from the period before Constantine, or the Age of the Martyrs, to support the idea that Christians were continually persecuted. Most of this information comes from later writers, especially from the anonymous hagiographers who edited, reworked, and even forged stories about martyrs during periods of peace. The stories of beloved martyrs like St. Valentine, St. Christopher, and St. George were written long after the time in which these people supposedly lived, by authors who were preserving folklore, not facts.
The reason these Christians invented martyrdom stories and saw their history as a history of persecution is because then, as now, martyrdom was a powerful tool. Early Christians respected saints as holy people with a special connection to God. And, as already noted, there was no better argument for the sincerity of an individual’s belief than the fact that he or she was prepared to die for it. As such, in later times martyrs were powerful spokespersons for the church. When early Christians wanted to prove the antiquity and orthodoxy of their own opinions, they would edit or compose a story attributing their own views to an early Christian orthodox martyr. An anecdote in which a martyr denounced a heretic was worth a hundred rational arguments about why that heretical position was wrong. Martyrs became mouthpieces for later religious positions.

Imagine basing your “feasts” on potentially non-existent “saints”!

Muslims should definitely stay away from celebrating Valentine’s Day, which is rooted in shirk and uncertainty even from their own standards!

RELATED: The Deification of Christ: Christian Misrepresentations

https://muslimskeptic.com/2022/02/15/its-not-just-christmas-how-christianity-adopts-paganism-for-valentines-day/

 

[Hamzza]

@Basra

 

[Basra]

@Basra

Thanks for tagging me @Hamzza but NO thanks!


The problem with Muslims is- we are muslims by rituals and not the heart. Muslims should be confident in their Imaan and Islam. Periodt.


The matter of the heart is universal. Celebrating it is no different than celebrating Thanksgiving day- which personally i interpret it as Thanks To Allaah swt!

 

[Molotoff]

Thanks for tagging me @Hamzza but NO thanks!


The problem with Muslims is- we are muslims by rituals and not the heart. Muslims should be confident in their Imaan and Islam. Periodt.


The matter of the heart is universal. Celebrating it is no different than celebrating Thanksgiving day- which personally i interpret it as Thanks To Allaah swt!

Eedo @Basra, st valentines day is a catholic holiday!