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Christmas comes to Saudi Arabia for the first time
The most populous Muslim country, Saudi Arabia celebrated Christmas for the first time. The country, no doubt has recently…
The most populous Muslim country, Saudi Arabia celebrated Christmas for the first time. The country, no doubt has recently experienced a lot of changes in terms of liberalising the use of other religious symbols and celebrating non-Muslim holidays.
More so, the deliberate cultural revolution in the country happens under Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, allowing various events to take place from fashion shows to film festivals across the kingdom.
To the surprise of Saudi citizens, there was a deliberate display of Christmas trees, some of which were priced at around 3,000 dollars, especially around the kingdom of Riyadh.
Recall that the kingdom started easing restrictions on Christmas celebrations last year, this move was to show how tolerant it has been toward non-Muslim religious festivities.
No doubt, the Christmas celebration has long been a controversial issue across the Islamic world as more conservative Muslims see it as part of the West’s cultural colonialism.
In the past, Riyadh banned all non-Islamic celebrations in public as the country’s official Wahhabi religious ideology regards it as a form of blasphemy. But under MBS, that understanding has been replaced with a more liberal understanding of non-Muslim holidays.
“Now, Christmas cheer is creeping into Saudi Arabia as social restrictions ease under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who wants Saudis to have some fun and spend more money at home and needs foreigners to enjoy living here enough to stay and help build new industries unrelated to oil,” The Wall Street Journal reported from Riyadh.
Saudi supermarkets are now full of Christmas trees some very expensive ones, and other sale items related to the holiday as the country’s religious police avoid Christmas shoppers. All these as a result of the fact that Christmas comes to Saudi Arabia for the first time!
In October, the kingdom also took part in Halloween celebrations, an Anglo-Saxon-origin event, which has commercially spread to several other countries.
But Santa Claus can still not ring his bell in Saudi Arabia. “They are only strict with Santa Claus,” said a salesman to the WSJ, referring to the country’s religious police.
Importantly, in recent years, the government has granted Saudi women more freedoms (while still locking up women’s rights advocates), introduced once-forbidden entertainments like electronic music concerts (while silencing conservative dissenters) and muzzled the virtue-and-vice police, who used occasionally to launch raids on non-Muslim religious gatherings.
Many Saudis expect that even alcohol, once among the reddest of lines, will soon become legal.
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