A Muslim Christmas Greeting

This Message appeared in today's Louisville Newspaper I am delighted to share it with you.

‘I am overjoyed at the sights and sounds of Christmas’
The Christmas season is now simply referred to as the holiday season. It has become taboo to wish a Christian friend, co-worker, business associate, or a client, a Merry Christmas. The rationalization behind this transformation is that the word Christmas may be “offensive” to non-Christians. I am not quite sure how this trend started. Was it requested or demanded by the easily offended, or was it an unsolicited act of giving and accommodating, for which Christianity and its followers are famous? Whatever the reason, as a Muslim, I want to make it clear to Christians of this great country and the world that I am not, at all, offended by the word Christmas.

Far from being offended, I am overjoyed at the sounds and sights of Christmas. How can a festival that is important to 2 billion people of the world be offensive to anyone with even a semblance of sanity or an iota of fairness? Contrarily, I am offended when someone thinks that I may be offended by hearing the sounds of Christmas or encountering a Christmas tree. I am quite sure that many Muslims, Hindus, Jews and other non-Christians share my feeling.

It is unfair, inhuman, discriminatory and un-American to ask or expect Christians to refer to Christmas, a time of great emotional, religious and cultural significance in Christianity, by a wrong name. Even if this change of nomenclature was initiated by Christians themselves as an act of graciousness, it is the moral duty of non-Christians to insist that this change should be reversed.

Would Muslims want the beautiful connotation of Eid Mubarak replaced? Would Hindus want the majesty of Happy Diwali substituted? Would Jews want the glory of Happy Hanukkah made irrelevant? I hope not. Human equality should not and must not create the need to dilute the heartwarming glows of the diversity of various cultural and religious festivals.

Every fair society ensures, as America has, that the “tyranny of the majority” does not exist among its midst, but the dissolution of this “tyranny” must not engender the tyranny of the minorities.

To my Christian brothers and sisters, I say: I wish you a Merry Christmas; I hope that you enjoy your beautiful Christmas trees, in this season of love, joy and sharing. By the way, Merry Christmas to me too.

SIDDIQUE MALIK

Louisville 40245