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Professor Tariq Ramadan is a man of no need to introduction. He holds MA in Philosophy and French literature and PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Geneva. In Cairo, Egypt he received one-on-one intensive training in classic Islamic scholarship from Al-Azhar University scholars. Tariq Ramadan is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University (Oriental Institute, St Antony’s College ). He is also teaching at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford. He is at the same time a Visiting Professor in Qatar (Faculty of Islamic Studies) and in Morocco (Mundiapolis) and a Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan).[/symple_box]
Muslims recognise Jesus (peace be upon him) as a Messenger and a Prophet but not as the son of God. Christmas is a Christian festival. Yet its teaching, through the ages, is a universal message: to love God and human beings is the essence of the spiritual quest. To love is to give, to offer, to sacrifice. The important thing is not the gift that we receive, but the one we offer with our heart, our being, our love.
The consumer society has often perverted this message. Christmas has become the pretext for consumption, purchase, expenditure. It was about heart and spirituality, and here we are carried away by the materialistic one-upmanship. Just like the month of sacrifice and love that is the month of Ramadan. We end up fasting in order to eat more and spend unnecessarily. It was supposed to be a spiritual elevation through the fast of the heart, it ends up to be burdening the body with the weight of feasts.
We pervert the most beautiful messages by losing the essence of our spiritual rituals and celebrations. Christians and Muslims, like all the followers of religious and spiritual traditions of the world, must engage in resistance to a consumerist and quantitative spirit which kills the meaning : a collective “jihad” of simplicity and heart whereby we learn to give without counting and without having, once a year, to prove anything.
Because the gift of a discreet smile every day is better than a visible and expensive gift at Christmas or during Ramadan.
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Professor Tariq Ramadan is a man of no need to introduction. He holds MA in Philosophy and French literature and PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Geneva. In Cairo, Egypt he received one-on-one intensive training in classic Islamic scholarship from Al-Azhar University scholars. Tariq Ramadan is Professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University (Oriental Institute, St Antony’s College ). He is also teaching at the Faculty of Theology at Oxford. He is at the same time a Visiting Professor in Qatar (Faculty of Islamic Studies) and in Morocco (Mundiapolis) and a Senior Research Fellow at Doshisha University (Kyoto, Japan).[/symple_box]
