When Entertainment Replaces Values

When entertainment replaces values, society pays the price

By Paigham Mustafa

Music, song and dance are among humanity’s oldest pleasures. When combined with a compelling story, they can move people across generations. Yet these same forms of entertainment can also shape moral imagination in troubling ways. In societies already struggling with injustice and incoherence, popular culture can easily become a substitute for knowledge, offering emotion in place of ethics and myth in place of values. Where Quranic principles are absent or marginalised, entertainment steps into the vacuum, often normalising what should instead be viewed with caution.

Anything that impedes genuine social progress deserves scrutiny. From this perspective, Sufism, like other religious beliefs that masquerade as Islam while diverging from the Quran, presents a serious danger. It cloaks cultural myth and emotional excess in religious language, blurring the line between service to God and devotion to culture.

South Asian cultures, like all cultures, are rich in folk tales that shape how people understand love, duty and morality. These stories are frequently treated as parables for life and, increasingly, for spirituality itself. But they are rarely interrogated for the values they transmit. One such story, often celebrated rather than questioned, is the Punjabi folk tale of Sohni and Mahival.

The story is well known. Sohni, a potter’s daughter, falls in love with Mahival, a wealthy trader. Social conventions prevent their marriage, and Sohni is married off to another man. Defying this marriage, she secretly crosses a river at night using a clay pot to meet her lover. When her sister-in-law replaces the pot with an unbaked one, it dissolves in the water. Sohni drowns, and Mahival, witnessing her death, jumps in after her. Both die, immortalised as tragic lovers.

Those captivated by folklore often present this as a sublime love story. Within Sufi poetry and music, it is further elevated into a metaphor for devotion to the Divine: lovers so consumed by passion that their union is imagined as holy. Popular performers and platforms, including qawwali singers and high-profile music productions, have reinforced this reading. Mahival’s abandonment of wealth is likened to renunciation for God; Sohni’s perilous journey is compared to a pilgrimage to the Kaba.

If this story remained within the realm of folklore, its moral contradictions would be limited to cultural debate. The problem arises when it is reframed as religious symbolism and absorbed into what is presented as Islam. At that point, entertainment does not merely amuse; it instructs. And the instruction is deeply flawed.

First, the Quran decrees that Muhammad, the messenger, was not a mystic which negates any connection with Suffism. The Quran’s emphasis is on clear guidance, moral responsibility and the reform of society through just conduct. The messenger’s role was to pull people away from degenerative practices, not to sanctify them through metaphor.

Second, the story itself depicts social failure rather than moral resistance. Forced marriage is indeed a wrong, but the Quran addresses injustice by reforming its causes, not by romanticising its consequences. The Quranic account of Moses’ marriage illustrates a woman’s freedom to choose her spouse, underscoring consent and dignity rather than secrecy and deception.

Third, Sohni’s nightly meetings with Mahival amount to adultery, not virtue. However they are reframed, the actions being glorified are fundamentally opposed to Quranic principles of fidelity and honesty. Deception is central to the narrative, not incidental to it.

Then there is the role of the sister-in-law, who knowingly replaces the pot with one that will not survive the river. This act leads directly to Sohni’s death and, by extension, Mahival’s. At minimum, it is manslaughter; arguably, it is murder. To transform such a chain of actions into a spiritual allegory is to empty moral language of meaning.

Most troubling of all is the consequence. When folklore is fused with religion—whether through Sufism or any other construct—and then elevated as a form of devotion to God, it constitutes shirk: the displacement of divine guidance with human narratives. Authority is stripped from the Quran and reassigned to invented symbolism, allowing cultural fiction to masquerade as divine truth. This is not expression of Quranic values; it is distortion with serious social consequences. The Quran describes believers as those who promote what is right and restrain what is wrong. To pervert moral boundaries under the guise of love or spirituality is a serious betrayal of that mandate.

Entertainment plays a powerful role in shaping norms, especially when wrapped in religious sentiment and amplified for commercial gain. Songs and stories that glorify deception and infidelity, even symbolically, lead people away from the principles that enable societies to reform themselves. It is no accident that the Quran cautions against poets followed by those who stray, highlighting how art can mislead when untethered from truth.

There is a bitter irony in some modern adaptations of the Sohni–Mahival story, which warn against relying on fragile, transient supports while themselves offering precisely that. The Quran provides firm guidance; myths and legends do not. When people turn to the latter for moral affirmation, the erosion of values is gradual but profound. By the time a crisis emerges, the Quran is no longer seen as foundational, and society looks instead to stories that were never meant to guide it.

What appears on the surface as a simple love story is, on closer inspection, a social tragedy. It asks society to sympathise with adultery, excuse lethal wrongdoing and sanctify despair. That is not harmless entertainment; it is regression.

Yet there is a measure of hope. People may deviate, cultures may drift, and myths may masquerade as Islam, but the Quran remains preserved as a criterion. It offers a way back to coherence, justice and genuine progress. The challenge is whether societies will choose that return, or continue to mistake emotional spectacle for moral truth.

© 2026 Paigham Mustafa

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paigham Mustafa has been engaged in the study and research of the Quran since 1988 and has contributed to the print media for over 37 years. His first major work, The Quran: God’s Message to Mankind, was published in 2016, followed by The Divine Blueprint in 2022. He is also the author of How To Be Human, published in 2025. His exegesis of the Quran often challenges traditional readings, offering instead a reasoned and objective analysis of the original text. His works provide essential guidance,  helping readers gain a clearer, more informed understanding of Islam. This helps address many of the issues that stem from misunderstandings, misinterpretations, and misconceptions

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