Valentine's Day, Birthdays, Cricket, Music, Pants And Phones Are Haram‏

So you think Valentine’s Day is haram and shouldn’t be celebrated? If so, it is very likely that you also condone forcefully stopping people from celebrating it. From the fiery patriot-cum-pan-Muslim-cum-anti-West-cum-pro-vague-notions-of-glory crowd, we have seen many exclamations against the Valentine’s Day in the last few days.

To these passionate Muslim patriots, I have a few queries, merely out of curiosity: are birthdays halal or haram? I’m confused since they weren’t celebrated 1400 years ago. Is music halal? If yes, which one – the one Junaid Jamshed produces now or the one he produced a few years ago? Is cricket halal because according to the awesome scholar of Muslim world, Dr. Israr Khalifa, cricket should be banned because it incites immodest sentiments in the viewers and waste their time.

Are western dresses halal? Are cars, computers, products made by the capitalist-Western world halal because I am concerned – they take billions from us to their pockets which help them buy nukes, eat pork and a lot of other haram stuff. So perhaps the phone you are using, the laptop you preach people on, the tablet on which you speak Islam on Twitter, all of them send money away to Kafir companies for haram purposes. I shudder even to think about it.

That is not the end of it. TV is itself haram, most authentic hadiths will tell you. So is loudspeaker, if we are to believe the Mullahs of days gone by. Photos are haram and thus, photo studios should be haram. Identities must be limited to thumb prints perhaps – a Muslim country must have no place for the haram practice of photography. It is safe to state that 90% of our lifestyles today are haram in the light of orthodox Islam.

The big question is: what should we do. Should we start telling each other what sorry bunch of kafirs we are, start criticizing each other’s western dresses, houses, cars and laptops, demanding that government arrest everyone who is clean-shaven or wearing pants, and call on terrorist Islamist organizations to kill those who indulge in such Kafir practices (yes some ‘peaceful’ believers did that on Twitter on Valentine’s day – this was their ‘peaceful’ protest against a few people waving banners).

Should we put death bounties on each other’s heads because quite frankly, I can call you a non-believer for any of the aforementioned practices and find the excuse to chop your head, courtesy the freelancer Mullahs which are a dozen a dime in our land of pure.

Or should we let it be; stick with our notions, try to tell others what we think is right and listen to what they hold as true; argue peacefully, without calling for each other’s deaths, without slitting throats, without giving death threats, without branding each other Kafir, without jeopardizing each other’s lives on tiny issues.

Should we do this as a civilized nation, live and let live, be tolerant and accept all mindsets without letting anyone violate the basic human rights – or should we become the rabid dogs that rip each other’s throats and turn this nation into a pit of madmen?

The choice is yours.