Wish
You a Merry Christmas
By Siddique Malik
www.spreadfreedom.com
US
The Christmas season is now simply
referred to as the holiday season. It has become
a taboo to wish a Christian friend, co-worker,
business associate, or a client, a Merry Christmas.
The rationalization behind this unnatural 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 have
been famous for the millennia? 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 two billion people of the
world be offensive to any one 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 word 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 reverted.
Would Muslims want the beautiful connotation of
Eid Mubarak replaced? Would Hindus want the majesty
of Happy Devali substituted? Would Jews want the
glory of Happy Hanukkah made irrelevant? I hope,
not. Human equality should and must not create
the need to extinguish the heart-warming glows
of the diversity of various cultural and religious
festivals.
Every great country 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. My holidays will be
happy only if you will have a Merry Christmas.
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