sqweels:
It’s not superstition. It’s a form of idolatry, to celebrate the holiday of another religion.
In Spain any festival involving disguises, specially where those may hide your face, gets automatically conflated with Carnaval (Mardi Gras). So here, Halloween has two versions:
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Some schools celebrate it (no hidden faces allowed, no we don’t care whether you’re Spiderman or Daffy Duck we still need to see your face). They may have no classes or reduced classes, but the children still spend the usual length of time at the school. No trick or treat.
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Grown ups get disguised, go to a party at a club and get drunk.
Muslims whose kids go to those schools have their kids celebrate Halloween (inasmuch as you can call that “celebrate Halloween”). Practicing Muslims won’t be found in a number 2 unless they happen to be the waiter.
Yeah, but who doesn’t?
They have nothing to do with it because they consider it a religious holiday. Many people make the same case for celebrating Christmas in the US and dismiss the concerns of Jews and others who consider it a Christian holiday. It’s a central point of your argument.
The point he’s making is that if the people who actually practice it don’t consider it a religious holiday, who are you to say that they are wrong and you who know nothing about current practices are right?
You can’t argue that you don’t celebrate any holidays that were ever celebrated as being (non-Jewish) religious, because then you’d have to leave out Thanksgiving, as it was originally a religious observance, as Plymouth governor William Bradford’s book Of Plymouth Plantation states, thanking God for the harvest.
It doesn’t match up with Christmas, as that holiday is [still] celebrated as a religious holiday by a lot of people. It makes sense that you can’t claim it isn’t religious. But Halloween? Nope. There’s a Wiccan holiday that takes place on the same day, but it isn’t Halloween.
I’m fine with not celebrating it, but the excuse that the reason is that it’s a Christian holiday doesn’t hold water.
It’s not an argument I support either, but other people honestly believe so and can support their argument logically and have done so. I don’t dismiss their beliefs lightly.
The point is that it has origins in a religious holiday. Incidentally, many Orthodox Jews don’t celebrate Thanksgiving either.
Re the OP’s original question, I asked a fairly recent Pakistani immigrant colleague about this. He said that a “practical” Muslim would not celebrate Halloween, because the Prophet said there are only two holidays, but many Muslims would participate because they “want to blend in”. I have other Muslim friends who actually grew up in the USA, I’ll try to ask them in the next few days and post back on this thread.
In my neighbourhood, the mix of kids trick-or-treating (and we got 250) were pretty much a reflection of the neighbourhood. In this case, mostly non-white; and in Canada, his means an equal mix of oriental, sikh, hindu and/or moslem (East Indian), Phillipino, and West Indian; ncluding pre-teen Sikh boys wearing what looks like a tight smurf hat.
My guess is that like “Christians”, some care and don’t believe in celebrating an inappropriate day, others take Halloween in the spirit that it is gven in North America - a time to have fun with any religious/paganistic/satanistic overtones long discarded in favour of the “fun factor”.
IIRC All Hallows Eve was time for the witches and evil spirits to have a last big blast before the solemnity of All Saints’ Day, the feast day of any saints that don’t get their own day.
They could fit right in by wearing white burqas.
Cite?
Point taken. I can see this being the case in America. But the Muslim world is much larger than that, and it was the worldwide umma to which I was referring.
I seriously, seriously, seriously doubt that many Muslim families are just fine with their kids observing Hannukah. :dubious:
Yeah, I too have some serious doubts about Johanna’s claims here, and her factual authority (or lack thereof) for making them.
Burqas are scary no matter what color they are. :eek:
But would, say, a witch outfit be acceptable for a muslim girl so long as it had a long enough skirt?
It really depends on the person. Some Muslims would be perfectly fine with the “sexy witch in a miniskirt” while others might not be. There is no single central authority or set of rules, and of course different people have different levels of adherence. It’s just like Christianity- some people are really in to it and get really uptight, others are just in it for the holidays and don’t really worry too much.
You know all the wrong Muslims! Drinking is not haram. Drunkenness is a sin, but not like eating pork. I would say about 75% of the Muslims I know will have a drink or smoke or two or three. Most don’t get totally trashed, but then, I don’t hang with the “get totally trashed” crowd in general.
You need to hang out with more Asian Muslims. They’ve got that pluralist, liberal Islam going ON.*
*ETA–yes, that, too is a generalization. It’s a cultural one. Like French people drink more wine. Certainly there are many liberal Muslims in the West, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. But if you want to party, and you don’t know them personally, I’d place your bets on people from Mumbai, Istanbul and Tatarstan.
I have partied in İstanbul, and yeah I guess you’re right about that.
Of course, even non-fundamentalist Muslim families wouldn’t initiate Hanukkah celebrations in their own households, but why would they object to their kids participating in Hanukkah festivities with their Jewish friends? AFAIK, there’s nothing in the doctrinal or dietary aspects of Hanukkah that is intrinsically offensive to Muslim beliefs or practices. Unlike Christian observances, Jewish observances aren’t viewed in Islamic doctrine as idolatrous or polytheistic.
Of course, antisemitic extremist Muslims who reflexively hate everything Jewish would object to their kids’ having any involvement with Hanukkah. But that’s because they’re antisemitic extremists, not because it violates mainstream Islamic doctrine. If you find it hard to believe that there could be “many” Muslim families who don’t have a problem with Hanukkah, you may be overestimating the proportion of antisemitic extremists among Muslims in the US and worldwide.
For example, famously, in 2007 a 20-year-old Muslim attended a Hanukkah celebration hosted by some Jewish young people whom he had defended from a group of thugs on the New York subway. (The thugs were trying to make the Jewish friends wish them “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Hanukkah”.) AFAICT, most US Muslims considered that completely unobjectionable.