Photo by CoCreatr.

Nothing sounds grumpier than the annual blast against St. Valentine's Day we get from Uzbekistan and some of the other stans, and for that matter, Russia. It's not just about Muslim clerics seeking to eradicate dubious Christian cultural traditions that undermine their authority; it's about the Russian Orthodox Church also seeing something particularly loathsome about this particular Western Christian feast-day — a holiday that is just about shorn of all its religious connotation in the West, as it has been absolutely commercialized and monetarized.  (And it's a good thing, too, or recession-hounded merchants would have nothing to bring in revenue between Black Friday, which has now spawned even Black Thursday Night at Thanksgiving time, Christmas of course, and Easter — another chocolatified monetarized bonanza).

So what bothers the Uzbek government so much about this particular holiday? If you read the supposed history of this holiday, it was a pagan festival to start with on the (pre?)-Roman holiday of Lupercalia, which the Catholic Church worked overtime to convert because of its undesirable activities — described sedately by that source as young men picking the names of young women randomly out of an urn for sexual couplings, but explained in Wikipedia as being more about wolves and sacrificing goats and dogs, then running around naked and beating with thongs any women willingly coming out to meet them.

I'm having trouble believing the claim that Emperor Claudius II completely outlawed marriage in the 3rd century (!) on the grounds that single men made better soldiers than married men, helping St. Valentine to get his start, because he then secretly wed young lovers. I can't help thinking there would never even have been a 4th century if Emperor Claudius II was even slightly successful with this venture, but whatever the origins, St. Valentine himself, associated with lovers and love himself (falling in love despite being destined for sainthood) was used to overlay a precious culture's undesirable features.

So here we all are now with the holiday largely serving as a retail stimulus, mainly for chocolate, cards and flowers, and yet the Uzbek government (not the spiritual authorities, although they may have been pressed into service) getting all mad at this. Why?

Perhaps it symbolizes all the worst features of Christian holidays — promotion of the individual's romantic love for no particular purpose, in defiance of state plans; promotion of love despite the emperor's tendency to throw people in jail they don't like; promotion of the couple's desires in defiance of the state's military imperatives.

None of these features may be particularly "Christian" in their notion but certainly are Western (and since "Rome" is part of the West, it would be interesting to follow how we got, by way of St. Valentine, from a world in which the Emperor could even stop human pro-creation supposedly in the name of military exigency to a world in which people could have a great excuse to buy — and eat — lots of boxes of chocolate.

I couldn't help wondering if what the Russian, Uzbek and other post-Soviet governments hate about St. Valentin's Day is that it so glibly popularizes and monetarizes a religious holiday. Everybody remembers the "saint' part of it and that this saint had something vaguely to do with love, but they don't really recall the religious context and the Catholic Church or other Christian churches don't promote any special St. Valentine's Day masses or festivals.

I recall the Uzbek government and spiritual authorities were particularly exercised in recent years about what they saw as the commercialization of Ramadan, or at least, the ostentatious celebration of the nightly breaking of fast in lavish public dinners where people treated their friends. That seems awfully surly, given that such social occasions loosely based around a religious custom seem to be the heart of the community — and this year, the Uzbek government relented on discouraging the feast day altogether, and limited themselves simply to cautioning the faithful to refrain from excesses.

Interestingly, now Uzbek authorities aren't going to stop at just banning St. Valentine and his dubious romantic, individualist, anti-state threats, they are going to substitute him — much like the Church authorities of another century did with Valentine himself — with Moghul Emperor Babur, as the BBC reports. Fortunately for them, Babur's birthday was on February 14, which is why he has come in so handy.

I turned to Flickr to see what visuals were available for Emperor Babur, and of course found that he had built some delightful gardens in Kabul. And among the delightful photo streams comes one from the US Embassy in Kabul, which contrived to put on this interesting cultural exchange in October 2011:

Thousands of Kabul school children will have the opportunity to learn about the history of Babur's Garden, Babur's tomb, and the Queen's Palace through an education initiative funded by the U.S. Embassy in Kabul and conducted by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. The students receive printed materials about these cultural heritage sites, school supplies, and snacks as part of the tour. More than 10,000 local school children have received tours as part of this initiative. (Department of State)

I wonder if there are any chocolates in those goody bags.

US Embassy Kabul

 UPDATE:  On cue, David Trilling has a piece on EurasiaNet in which he decides the anti-Valentine's Day spasm in Central Asia is all about Muslims:

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders?

A menace of the heart must grip Registan.net's Nathan Hamm, who then grumps about Trilling and the Western media obsessing about this hate on Valentine's Day for weeks. In doing so, he reveals something funny — somebody — David himself or Justin Burke, the managing editor, trimmed Trilling's fulmination (bold added):

So what’s with the assault on Valentine’s Day? Yes, it’s nominally a Christian holiday in a predominantly Muslim region, but the elites who call the shots are secular. Could it be that menace of the heart, jealousy, gripping Central Asia’s leaders? Could it be, since governments around the region already maintain a monopoly on people’s voices, they also expect control over their hearts? Without more than empty “national values” on offer, they’re unlikely to succeed.

Good Lord, that's hilarious, not the first, and not the last such perlustration to occur on EurasiaNet!

Actually, both Trilling and Hamm are wrong, because it's not about Muslims, it's about Soviet state culture persisting and taking this form to this day.

A Russian mayor of a region, Belgorod, neither of which is distinguished by being Muslim, also banned the holiday — and in the past, going all the way back to the Soviet era, this was always a holiday the commissars discouraged.

But don't let those sorts of facts get in the way of having a good hate on "ignorant Westerners" who once again are saying something unfair about the "Mooooslims" as Jillian York would put it.

I think it's fine that the Western press obsessed about it, because it helps the mass public think about what these societies are about and how they respond to the West, which is something you have to understand.

Hamm sounds as fussy and controlling as the authorities in these Eurasian countries, scolding us for caring about this story:

Yes, the way that not only Uzbekistan’s government, but also others in the region, attacks rock music, modern incarnations of western holidays like Valentine’s Day or Halloween, etc. make them look silly. It’s not even clear if the constituencies that are generally in support of the amorphous collection of culturally conservative linguistic nationalist beliefs that are the content of “national values” even care about things like Valentine’s Day all that much. (If Tata Ulan or the self-described intellectual quoted in the BBC story are any indication, there are in fact such constituencies — the governments are not entirely out of touch with the public.) But the explanation for the attacks, which sadly was lacking in most of the western coverage, needn’t be overblown.

Well, it's Valentine's Day, and the story is fairly light-weight, so no need to write a treatise about every single holiday and every sort of prescriptive morals code the Uzbeks or other Central Asians come up with to control culture. What it's all about is not only alient cultures but commerce, and it's commerce that helped propel the cultural memes throughout the world