No, We Will Not Have A Christmas Tree This Year Either

What would Muslim Jesus do?

It was Duane Reade in December, so there were wreaths floating over every aisle, endless holiday music on loop, and daughters F and Z grinning as they asked if we could have a Christmas tree at home. Maybe they thought they were being funny or maybe they thought our reaction was sure to be funny. We probably wouldn’t have said much if they hadn’t added what came next.

They told us that many of their friends, including those who also attended the Islamic Center of Greater Cincinnati, put up Christmas trees, even if they didn’t celebrate. (I wanted them to explore the distinction between decorations and celebrations, but parents of teens and philosophy majors alike learn with equal speed the importance of not saying the first thing that comes to mind.)

Maybe you’ve had this conversation too. It’s hard to imagine it hasn’t come up somehow. Though for us, and maybe surprisingly, it didn’t come up again.

As in: they didn’t ask about Christmas trees again. Not last year—or this year.

Does that mean our answers stuck? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But confronting a contrast with many of your peers, not to mention friends, or finding yourself at odds with folks in your religious community, is never easy. So I’m guessing it’ll surface again.

And maybe they’ll wonder: What’s the big deal?

After all, it’s just a tree (or holiday lights, or a wreath, or what have you). And maybe it seems like that. But to me, Christmas decorations are a “condensed symbol,” something small that stands in for many more things.

And, to me, many of those things are incompatible with how I understand our faith. I’ll share why I think so—but, as you read why, please keep the following in mind: I’m not an Islamic scholar. I’m not telling you, or your family, what to do. I’m talking about heavy stuff, but my conclusions are not intended accusatorially. We are all responsible before God for how we decide to live. Not for anyone else’s decisions. We all draw boundaries, after all. We have to. (Every serious way of life requires it.) We just draw these boundaries in different places.

Here I’ll tell you where we draw ours.

‘We Made You A Middle Nation’—God

Every year, on their birthdays, I write the kids letters, saying things I wish I’d heard or known growing up, things I hope they know, too—about me, about them, about how I feel about them. For F, whose birthday wasn’t so long ago, what I told her included this: Who we are right now is a product of who we were yesterday. Who we are tomorrow will be a product of the choices and changes and prayers we make today. So, if you want to be someone different tomorrow, start today.

For that matter, if we don’t want ourselves, or our offspring, or their offspring, to be someone else in the future, at the least we should make certain commitments today. I want to raise Muslims who want to raise Muslims who want to raise Muslims. I want them to live lives enriched by a beautiful, intimate, and deep connection to God. I want them to know who He is, what they owe to Him, and that, even though He transcends creation, He is with them, wherever they are.

But the fact is, those are no longer common beliefs, widely shared: America these days is overwhelmed by two powerful narratives. One’s conservative and often not particularly warm to Muslims—or Islam. The other is outwardly welcoming, but rests on assumptions that could easily become very corrosive to a strong monotheism. Caught between the tension, what’s to say a small, scattered community will survive?

We cannot afford to be lackadaisical about continuity.

The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is recorded as having said that we—meaning the ummah, his community—have two holidays, Eid al-Fitr, after Ramadan, and Eid al-Adha, after the Hajj pilgrimage. (Tangent: Every Friday is also an Eid. Take that, literalists.) Though it is perhaps unreasonable—and I readily admit I may be very wrong—I’ve taken this to mean that we, as an ummah, share two religious holidays, but that other occasions are acceptable to celebrate…

• So long as we do not elevate them to the status of religious obligation or ritual.

• So long as they do not involve content that places us in tension with our faith.

As such, I am comfortable with celebrating non-religious holidays, like those that are so common to so many Americans, including Thanksgiving. (For Halloween, and mostly just to tease F, who once told me a red Target polo I liked “makes you look like you work at Target,” I dressed up as a Target employee, name tag and all. Her friends found this funny. She did not.) Of course, this poses a double dilemma. Who decides what is religious and what is not?

And.

What happens when the same holiday is religious for some people—and secular for others?

In the first instance, our family decides for our family. In the second instance, I also say: Both iterations of Christmas, the secular and the religious, leave me unsettled for different reasons, but equally skeptical of celebrating. If my job, as a Muslim, is to live out a certain way of life, and my job, as a parent, is to bequeath that to those I am responsible for, then that must be done not just through saying things, but embodying them. In fact, embodiments speak louder than words.

Which is to say, what would it say to overtly let Christmas into our house? I don’t know for sure. I can’t know for certain. But I do know that it makes me deeply uncomfortable for several reasons.

I keep my distance from Christmas because I believe that that may—may!—help keep Muslim identities afloat a little longer in an otherwise stormy sea, so often hostile to organized piety. Morality, identity, and community requires boundaries. This is all the more so the case when you’re a minority, and the pressure on you to dissolve into the larger, more attractive mass is immense.

I also keep my distance from Christmas out of respect to religious Christians.

I believe Islam in America, and elsewhere across the world, albeit at different speeds, is harmed by the isolating, atomizing effects of unchecked materialism, with its problematic assumptions about the origin, purpose, and ends of life. My avoidance is therefore a kind of solidarity with those Christians likewise tempest-tossed, suffering the consumerist appropriation of their traditions.

But I also keep my distance from Christmas because of those traditions—as they emerged and are intended, a celebration of divine incarnation, what Muslims call associationism (shirk). Quite simply, I am vigilant about any association with associationism. If there’s one thing that Islam rejects above all else, it is any compromise with unitarian monotheism (tawheed).

Without it, nothing of Islam makes sense.

With it, though, all of Islam makes sense, what is distinctive about Islam remains, and so:

• Any course on Islam should start where Islam starts: With tawheed.

• Any course on Islam must acknowledge opposites and opposition: The converse of tawheed is shirk. We are not okay with shirk.

Because while all religions are valuable, they are not therefore the same. Either Jesus (peace be upon him) is the Messiah, or he is not.

Either Jesus is the son of God, or he is not.

In a recent Friday Sermon, Imam Omar Suleiman noted how the Prophet advised us to keep our distance from that which can sow doubt and dissension; since I am skeptical of consumerist Christmas, and do not want to advance its further secularization, and since the religious purpose of Christmas is grounded in the deification of Jesus, and this is something I do not agree with, why approach the holiday at all?

On the Day of Judgment, the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, informed us, even the holiest will be overcome; Jesus, for example, will be alarmed, fearing that God will hold him accountable for the decisions of some of his followers to associate him with God. Do I want, even tangentially, to be associated with an association that the Messiah, who incidentally is coming back one of these days, is so upset by that it’ll be the one and only thing he thinks of when standing for final judgment?

And, you know, he was a miraculous child. And, you know, God chose him to be the Messiah. And, you know, God sent him back into the world near the end of its time.

And still: That will be his concern. His fear. His grief.

As I see it, there’s no other holiday in American life where the stakes are, theologically speaking, so high; from an identitarian perspective, too, it seems like a pretty big deal—it is, after all, the biggest holiday and while I’m sometimes skeptical of invoking the slippery slope, that doesn’t make it a priori ridiculous. Because one thing I’ve learned from having kids around is their fondness for analogies: If it’s okay to do X, why can’t we do Y? (More on this to come.)

Not A Fatwa

So, no, there will not be a Christmas tree this year either. Not that anyone asked this year, or even last year. But just in case. We should know where we stand. But we should articulate that with respect, compassion, and wisdom. I believe acknowledging and establishing differences is necessary for a mature religiosity (and, incidentally a thriving democracy). Doing so in caustic ways, however, is disrespectful to God—and to our brothers and sisters in humanity.

I hope I have not done either here. 

After all, a fatwa is supposed to be a nonbinding legal opinion. This essay isn’t even a legal opinion, let alone a binding one. It’s just my reflection on what I believe to be the better choice in a complex situation. I could be wrong! My wife and I sometimes strongly disagree on questions of religiosity (I will happily acknowledge she’s the far more pious and God-fearing one.) And if two people in love can so often see things so differently…

The point is, I do not want my opinion to be interpreted derogatorily or vituperatively. My hope, instead, is that this comment sparks a conversation. Maybe with me, but more so within your family. Your community. Your context. It seems like a deceptively simple exercise, but it’s good practice for planning your family halaqa—or even, if the kids are mature enough and so amenable, involving them too. Where do we draw the boundaries between separation and assimilation?

What do these terms even mean?

What happens when faith and society make different claims on us? That may start a conversation about being Muslim, yes, but being Muslim in America right now, too.

P.S. Also we have two cats, one of whom was named Kylo (as in “Kylo Ren”—see also: self-fulfilling prophecies); as such, even if we decided to have a tree or, say, Christmas lights, cat would decisively, irrevocably, and totally destroy said tree and/or lights and possibly a fair portion of the house in the process.

Below, picture of cat.

Credit: Z.