BEIRUT—The Iranian cultural attaché stepped up to the microphone on a stage flanked by banners bearing the faces of Iran’s two foremost religious authorities: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—founder of the Islamic Republic, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei—current supreme leader.
To the left of Ayatollah Khomeini stood a twinkling Christmas tree, with a gold star gilding its tip. Angel ornaments and miniature Santa hats nestled among its branches. Fake snow dusted fake pine needles.
“Today we’re celebrating the birth of Christ,” the cultural attaché, Mohamed Mehdi Shari’tamdar, announced into the microphone, “and also the 40th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution.”
“Hallelujah!” boomed another speaker, as Elias Hachem recited a poem he had written for the event. “Jesus, the Savior, is born: The King of Peace, the Son of Mary. He frees the slaves. He heals. The angels protect him. The Bible and the Quran embrace.”
“We’re celebrating a rebel,” proclaimed a third speaker, the new mufti of the Shiite Muslims of Lebanon. The rebel in question happened to be Jesus.
The mufti, Ahmed Kabalan, went on to engage in some novel religious and political thinking: Christians and Muslims, he said, “are one family, against corruption, with social justice, against authority, against Israel, with the Lebanese army and with the resistance.”
The proclamations from the stage were applause lines—perhaps against the odds, given that the audience at the Iranian-sponsored event last week consisted mostly of observant Shiites from the Hezbollah-dominated southern suburbs of Beirut. Occasionally the crowd chanted praise for the Prophet Muhammad.
When a pair of Iranian bands flown in for the occasion began playing Assyrian and Persian Christmas carols, the audience clapped along.
Religious coexistence
FROM its founding as an independent republic, Lebanon has walked a tightrope, not always successfully, with its Muslim and Christian populations. They are just two of the country’s 18 officially recognized sects.
It’s nearly 30 years after the end of a civil war that saw Beirut cloven into Muslim and Christian halves connected only by a gutted buffer zone. Lebanese from all different sects now commonly mingle every day at home, at work and in public.
But few seasons frame the everyday give-and-take of religious coexistence quite like Christmastime in Lebanon.
That Christmas is important in Lebanon, whose population is more than 40 percent Christian, is no surprise. But the holiday here also has a much more universal appeal—perhaps helped by the presents, the feasting and the twinkly lights.
A colossal Christmas tree stands across a downtown street from Beirut’s even more colossal blue mosque. Half the women snapping selfies there wear hijabs.
Children with veiled and unveiled mothers wait in line at the City Center mall to whisper wish lists to the mall’s Santa. In school, children of all sects exchange “Secret Santa” gifts in class.
Even Hezbollah, the Shiite political movement and militia that the United States has branded a terrorist organization, has helped ring in the season.
In previous years it imported a Santa to Beirut’s southern suburbs to distribute gifts. On Saturday Hezbollah representatives were on-hand for the Iranian Christmas concert—an event that also featured handicrafts by Iranian artists. The organization however skipped Santa this year because of financial constraints.
These demonstrations of Christmas spirit seem intended, analysts said, to demonstrate Hezbollah’s inclusivity as a major political and military force in Lebanese society, and to highlight its political alliances with Christian parties.
Christmas’s commercial appeal
BUT just as it has been for many secular Americans, the commercial appeal of Christmas has proved strong for many non-Christians here.
“We’re Lebanese,” said Ruba Zay’our, a Muslim woman who had come to the City Center mall in southern Beirut with her family and that of her sister to take photos with the tree and introduce the children to Santa. “We want presents!”
Zay’our had decorated a small Christmas tree at home, which, to her frustration, was losing a branch a day at the curious hands of her toddler son. Her eldest, in ninth grade, celebrated as he asked his Secret Santa at school for a PlayStation 4 game.
Nada Suweidan, an accountant shopping at the mall, wasn’t certain how much of her son’s wish list Santa would fulfill this year.
But Suweidan was certain of the religious propriety of her family’s Christmas celebration, which involved the whole family getting together and her brother dressing up as Santa for the children. After all, Jesus is considered a prophet
in Islam.
“Jesus isn’t only for the Christians,” she said.
Much as the holiday lights flashing around Beirut seemed to defy the exasperating reality of Lebanon’s electrical grid, which is so overwhelmed that daily blackouts are scheduled across the city. The Lebanese embrace of Christmas can be read as a temporary reprieve from the economic and political gloom.“We need a real Santa Claus to come and take all the Lebanese away,” said Mohamed Ibrahim, a young electrician who was taking a selfie with his new wife Taghrid in front of the mall’s Nativity scene.
“Wherever he wants—anything’s better than here,” Taghrid, who works as a teacher, joked.
The latter grew up celebrating Christmas at school and said her family always puts up a tree at home. In her home village every year, a local man dressed up as Santa.
“Christmas is the only time you see [people gather] together with their family,” she said.
“Everyone is celebrating,” Mohamed said. “You feel like everyone is alike.”
‘Respect other cultures’
CHRISTMAS is by no means a universal part of the holiday calendar of observant Muslims, especially conservative ones—some of whom consider Christmas decorations and other rituals forbidden.
In previous years Lebanese Muslims have occasionally received mass text messages or pamphlets urging them not to participate in Christmas.
According to one television news report, some Christmas trees were burned down in 2015 in Tripoli, in the conservative Sunni-majority north.
But such instances have never happened in the Shiite south, even during Lebanon’s civil war, which lasted from 1975 to 1990. “We follow Imam Ali, who told us to respect other cultures,” said Ahmad Tarjoman, 48, a Beirut-based Iranian state television correspondent.
He attended the Christmas concert with his wife and daughter Tasnim, 5, who wore a pair of small reindeer antlers.
The family has a small Christmas tree at home, and Tasnim’s parents have brought her to see Santa—often called Papa Noël in Lebanon—at one of the local malls every year. As a result, the girl’s investment in Christmas was somewhat less philosophical than her father’s.
“She adores Santa,” Tarjoman said. “This year she wants a Barbie, even though she already has 50.”
Image credits: NATALIE NACCACHE/THE NEW YORK TIMES