Do Muslims celebrate Christmas?

After two years of living in Aston in the midst of Muslims, I must confess that I cannot really answer this question. Christmas is not a traditional Muslim feast, but since Muslims have great respect for Jesus and his mother Mary, it is quite possible that in some way they join their Christian brothers and sisters in celebrating the birth of Christ. But, as I said, I do not really know what is happening in the privacy of their families.

What we do ourselves at Christmas is to invite our neighbours for an afternoon tea or less threatening to them we take some presents to their homes. This is always well received and strengthens the bonds of good neighbourliness. It may also lead to some discussion about what is common and different in our respective faiths.

What I learned, not just from discussions but also from reading, is that Muslims do know about Jesus and Mary, but generally they are the Jesus and Mary as portrayed in the Qur'an, not in the Bible. Muslims do believe that the original Bible was the true word of God, but they maintain that subsequently the Biblical message was corrupted by both Jews and Christians, so that only the Qur'an remains as the uncorrupted word of God.

It is a strange experience for a Christian, as happened to me once, to be told that Jesus predicted the coming of Muhammad. My first reaction was to ask: where in the Gospels could one find such a pronouncement? But my partner was not quoting from the Bible, but from the Qur'an, where in chapter 61 Jesus refers to a messenger that will come after him. The strange feeling was that both of us seemed familiar with Jesus, but our so-called common Jesus was oh so different.

A reverse experience was reading a text from Seyyed Hossien Nasr about the word of God. He acknowledges that in Christianity the word of God is ultimately Christ, whereas in Islam it is the Qur'an. He then continues by discussing the vehicles of these respective words, how they came into the world. According to him, it is the illiteracy of the propehet Muhammad in Islam and the virginity of Mary in Christianity. The reason is in both instances the same: the vehicle for the word of God needs to be pure and receptive, all openness to the word of God. That is what Muhammad represents and that is what Mary represents.

Do the differences have a common root after all?

Ton