The seasonal controversy over the prohibition of Christmas in Jordan is no longer just a passing jurisprudential disagreement, and it cannot continue to be treated as a respected religious opinion that surfaces and then disappears. What we have witnessed recently with the public and organized rise of prohibitionist voices reveals a disturbing pattern of using religion as a political lever to reengineer national consciousness, and create a state of internal tension that affects the core of the Jordanian state.
These discourses do not occur in a vacuum, and do not arise apart from a troubled regional context, where the nation-state is receding in favor of cross-border ideological projects that see religious identities as an alternative mobilization tool to citizenship. When this language is summoned into Jordan, it not only targets Christians, but also the very idea of Jordan as an institutional state. What's dangerous about these calls is that they don’t explicitly state that they are against the state, but they work to hollow out the concept of citizenship. They redefine belonging as a religious affiliation before it is a national one, prioritize the fatwa over the law, and the doctrinal identity over the constitutional identity. At its core, this is a political project, not a religious one.
It’s no secret that some of these voices are intellectually and organizationally connected to agendas that view Jordan as a temporary entity or a functional state, and deal with Jordanian society as a testing ground for broader conflicts, rather than as a sovereign, stable entity. As such, targeting the shared living is not a side effect, but an intentional entry point to destabilize the interior by breaking the trust among its components, and to open the door to sectarian polarization.
In this context, the prohibition of the celebration is merely the tip of the iceberg. The implicit message broadcast to the society is: “This homeland does not belong to you, citizenship is conditioned by faith and the majority has the right to define nationalism.” If left unchallenged, this message produces a society of fear, not a state society.
Historically, Jordan has thwarted such projects not by repression, but by establishing a sensible national identity that has not made religion a battleground nor diversity a threat. The Jordanian Christian has never been outside the state, but at its heart, just as the Jordanian Muslim has never been asked to forsake his faith to be a fully-fledged citizen.
Defending Christmas today is defending the political boundaries of the state and the boundaries of religion. For when religion is used to divide Jordanians, it loses its moral function, just as politics, when it hides behind the fatwa, loses its national legitimacy. It is unacceptable for the public sphere to be turned into a platform of soft treason wrapped in the language of prohibition and zeal for doctrine. Here, we must pose the national, genuine question: Should we allow Jordan to be dragged into boxes of polarization we have historically not known?
Should we accept turning our citizens’ celebrations into an occasion for incitement rather than joy?
And do we realize that playing on the religious chord is the quickest way to demolish the idea of the state from within?
In Jordan, coexistence does not need fatwas to sanction it because it is not a favor from anyone to anyone else but a constitutional and political reality. And those who think that stirring tensions in the name of religion will grant them popular legitimacy should realize that the Jordanians, with their historical experience, are too aware to be lured into conflicts that do not resemble them and do not serve their state.
