Valentine’s Day Celebrations Banned in Peshawar, Pakistan

Valentine’s Day celebration has been officially banned in the city of Peshawar, Pakistan.

The district council unanimously passed a resolution banning people from observing the annual celebration of love, denouncing the festival as un-Islamic, and describing as a “useless” day with ‘vulgar and indecent’.

“The Valentine day has no place in our tradition and values,” reads the resolution, which also condemns the celebration of a “Western tradition” that is “against Islamic values”.

While Valentine’s Day is popular in many cities in Pakistan, conservative religious groups have condemned the tradition as a festival of immorality deemed detrimental to traditional marriage, further declaring the day to be “shameless”. A conservative newspaper described it as a “festival of obscenity”.

Valentine’s Day celebrations were banned by the local government in Kohat, in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, who reportedly told police officers to stop shops from selling Valentine’s Day cards and flowers BBC News reports.