Bismika Allahuma

What pro­ceeds is an ana­lyt­i­cal view of Christ­mas and appro­pri­ate Mus­lim con­duct dur­ing the Christ­mas season.

After the last war in Koso­vo, the over­all eco­nom­ic sit­u­a­tion of the coun­try has dete­ri­o­rat­ed in a dras­tic way. As is well-known, the end of war meant that Koso­vo became a tar­get for many Chris­t­ian orga­ni­za­tions, a phe­nom­e­non which seems to accom­pa­ny every war-emerg­ing coun­try nowa­days. The same hap­pened to post-com­mu­nist Alba­nia, as well as Bosnia, Rwan­da and sev­er­al oth­er coun­tries in the world involved in dif­fer­ent con­flicts. Need­less to men­tion, great pover­ty is a gate to dis­be­lief, as man is con­tin­u­ous­ly in search for the pro­vi­sion grant­ed to him by the Almighty and frus­tra­tion seems to cause all kinds of incon­gru­ent deci­sions. In order to elu­ci­date the bit­ter real­i­ty in Koso­vo, we are pre­sent­ing the case of the con­ver­sion of an entire Mus­lim fam­i­ly to Christianity.

Instead of writ­ing a full-scale biog­ra­phy of Jesus of Nazareth, I want to focus on some aspects of the life and teach­ing of Jesus of Nazareth that are com­mon­ly over­looked by most Chris­tians. Any attempt to recon­struct the his­tor­i­cal Jesus (as dis­tinct from the incar­nate deity of eccle­si­as­ti­cal faith) needs to take into account all the recov­er­able data about Jesus, much of which has been ignored by many Chris­tians because of its’ embar­rass­ment to Chris­t­ian ortho­doxy. Jesus’ report­ed say­ings in the Gospels are fre­quent­ly sub­ject­ed to tor­tu­ous exe­ge­sis by fun­da­men­tal­ist Chris­tians to make them fit lat­er church tra­di­tion. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, the data has been crit­i­cal­ly exam­ined by none oth­er than Chris­t­ian schol­ars themselves.