The Most Wonderful Time

*This post should have gone up at least 48 hours ago because er, its a Christmas post, but I decided to listen to my body and just take a break, man I needed one. So apologies for this belated post, but I figured you’d understand, us being friends and all. 

A couple of weeks ago, over the phone with my younger sister (also an observant Muslim like me), I had the following conversation:

Me: Have you gone shopping, been to the malls?

Her: No, but I want to, I just love seeing all the Christmas stuff

Me: Me too!  I love the songs, the lights, the decorations hehehee

Her: I knoooooowwwwww….its the most wonderful time of the year!

Clearly, we have drunk deeply of the Christmas spirit kool-aid, and fatwa or no fatwa, we’re going to hold on to our unrequited love of this holiday season.

Two things I want to share with this post. First, a reprint of a Christmas blog I wrote a couple of years ago, which first appeared on Patheos. Second, at the very bottom of that piece, a gift for the readers.

“MERRY CHRISTMAS, DEAL WITH IT”

The Chaudrys always rolled with the punches during the holidays. Despite the fact that we are a Pakistani-American Muslim family, my childhood is filled with as many holiday and Christmas memories that a self-professing believer could possibly have within the boundaries of Islamic theology. We didn’t “do” interfaith, we lived it.  It was good times. Things were simpler thirty-odd years ago.

I and my younger sister sang in the school choir faithfully from elementary to mid-high school. We happily took part in Christmas programs, often taking leads in certain parts due to our brown exoticism. The three wise men?  Little sister and I played two of them more than once. “O Holy Night” and “Silent Night” could move me to tears, though once I was old enough to realize lines such as “Christ is the Lord” and “Son of God loves pure light” were Islamically problematic, I opted to silently move my lips without saying anything — just for those particular lines.

One year the chorus instructor decided to open Little Drummer Boy with a solo tenor. And, thanks to Punjabi hormones-gone-wild, as a 12-year-old girl, I happened to be the manliest of the seventh grade boys. No one could deeply intone “tarum pa pum pum” more impressively than me, at least not till high school when the boys section wrestled back their vocal manhood from my increasingly feminine range. Curse you puberty!

My parents were almost always present at these concerts, my mother getting dressed to the nines in mortifying shalwar-kameez suits (mom, nooooooooo!), and my dad in the Desi-dad uniform. (Button down half-sleeve shirt and dress pants, whether mowing the lawn or going to a wedding.) They were thrilled at our performances, happy I suppose that their little girls were fitting right in to the U.S. of A.

My mother, the more religiously rigorous of our parents, insisted most years to put up Christmas lights outside the house. “It is part of our religion to be happy and celebrate with our neighbors,” she’d say, and if that theory didn’t convince my dad her alternate line of attack was “December 25^th is the birthday of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, founder of Pakistan! These lights are for him!”

Bottom line was my mother wanted to be part of the holiday spirit and would drag my father to neighbors holiday parties, where they wondered where the real food was and how Christians could live on cheese and crackers. They stopped going after both were pounced upon by their hosts under some well-placed mistletoe. For years my mother fumed about how my father very much enjoyed the next-door lady’s lips on his dimpled cheek.

The highlight of most years for us during the holiday season was visiting my father’s best friend, whose daughter happened to be my best friend. They were also Pakistani-American but Christian. You’ve never seen Christmas celebrated with such vigor as you will in a Punjabi household. Dholki played next to the Christmas tree? Check. Brown Santa looking suspiciously like Raja Mamu bellowing “HO, HO, OYE TERI!” Check. Holiday classics such as goat korma and tandoori chicken? Check.

Without ever having celebrated Christmas in our own home, we managed to collect many warm holiday memories. We were happy being happy with others. We enjoyed being with friends, colleagues and neighbors — seeing them laugh, giving them gifts and feeling like a collective, loving unit of humanity. There was little or no complication. We were comfortable in our faith, and we were open to sharing the joy others found in theirs.

Things have changed since then. The past decade or so has brought zealousness to many Muslims, as it has to others, which demands hyper-sensitivity to actual or perceived threats against Islamic tenets. The holiday season has become replete with Muslims across social networks warning of the sin and danger of wishing someone a “Merry Christmas,” regardless of the fact that many scholars have said it’s just fine. If there is ever a case of misplaced priorities, this is it.

It’s also a symptom of a greater illness among Muslims — missing the forest, almost every for the trees. We have become caught up in minute matters of fiqh, thinking this will please Allah (swt), instead of actively fighting for social justice. We strive to draw lines in stone between us and others, without acknowledging the Islamic imperative act with mercy, kindness and in peace with people of all faiths. We want to withdraw into our own spaces, blocking out anything and everyone that discomforts us. We forget that being ambassadors for Islam means being out there, out everywhere.

I’m getting better and better and rooting out the haraam-police (Is it wrong to call them “haram-ees?) on Facebook and from my real life, ironically drawing my own circle closer. Ugliness will always exist, but why let it into your world? I feel no threat to my faith, or to my identity by wishing others well in their time of celebration.

Every so often we are lucky enough to see public Eid greetings, which lift the spirits of Muslims, feel like a gift and give me the warm fuzzies. When my local television station flashes an “Eid Mubarak” greeting, I am pretty sure it’s not because they have suddenly embraced Islam. Likewise, wishing others a Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, or joyous Kwanzaa takes nothing from our own personal faith.

With New Year’s Day upon us, the holiday season is almost behind us; hopefully you didn’t let a contrived controversy over the words “Merry Christmas” stop you from doing what Islam commands — being kind and of the best manners. Remember that Allah (swt) judges us by our intentions. If you’re troubled by wishing others well during the holidays, you may want to check yours.

BACK TO ADNAN

We’ve raised over $37,000 for Adnan’s legal defense in the past week. I am deeply grateful to all of you for helping make that happen. We have three more weeks to raise funds online, and are yet a long way from our goal. If you loved Serial, enjoyed my blog, and think there was a miscarriage of justice, please consider giving a gift towards this fund if you haven’t already.

As I said earlier I’ll start publishing the trial transcripts, starting today with opening statements from the first trial from December 1999 (my electronic documents are broken up by day). I thought long and hard about the redaction dilemma and consulted with lawyer friends and colleagues that there would be no legal issues in publishing “as is” (and there is no legal issue with it by the way). I was wisely advised to ignore detractors (who both clamour for me to publish it all ASAP with or without redactions, but then have a shit fit when I mistakenly leave a name unredacted from previous documents), and instead see what my friends, colleagues, and Adnan’s supporters think, because they’re actually the only ones that matter to me.

So I crowdsourced the question on Facebook, and that actually helped me really suss out what my dilemma was.

Most of the responses said to publish without redactions (by the way, anyone can follow me on Facebook, and this post was public so the responses are open for public viewing), but a few voices I respect very much said to redact. Here is where my problem lies: I don’t want to expose people to harassment by internet trolls (though I second guess that too because my name is public, my brother is public, Adnan’s family is public, and really Jay and Jen are public names already too, and no one has been harassing the people I personally know), and at the same time the witnesses in this case are the people whose testimony sent an innocent 17 year old to prison for life. I don’t feel like I owe them anything; I feel like they owe Adnan and his family, at a minimum, being able to face public scrutiny for their testimony.

So here is where I’ve come down on the situation. I’m going to only redact the last names of witnesses who were kids in high school at the time of the murder or are vulnerable (Neighbor Boy, Mr. S, Nisha – particularly these three because of how Sarah has framed their situations to me), No one else gets redacted.

Here is the transcript for December 9, 1999, which opens with remaining voire dire issues and concludes with the opening statements of the prosecution and defense counsel.

OpeningStatements1