“New Year” not a Celebration but a Commiseration of Miseries and Crises!

News:

50% of Kenyans have described 2022 as the worst year. According to the latest report by research firm Infotrak, the prevailing high cost of living, unemployment and access to healthcare services, have been ranked among the leading issues of concern for Kenyans. Infotrak CEO Angela Ambitho also says that compared to last year, when a similar survey was done, nothing much has changed since Kenyans complained of the same issues. 82% of Kenyans are however optimistic, that 2023 will be better than this year.

Comment:

The so-called New Year’s Day, is a festival observed in most of the world on 1 January, the first day of the year in the modern Gregorian calendar. In their national addresses, the Secular-Democratic leaders normally brand the New Year as one course – correction and building back better! The citizen is told that a New Year brings fresh opportunities to start over, ride on it and make resolutions to achieve all the dreams!

The whole humanity today faces an unprecedented economic, political and social hardships. These miseries and crises are not a product of natural disaster but are entirely indeed designed by Capitalist governments having specific imperialistic viewpoint in life that seeks to protect specific interests of the elites and undermine all cultures and influences that may oppose it. The problems will keep emerging because of the manmade systems which are bound to faults due to the imperfect and self-centered nature of human beings. The only solution to these prevalent crises is to have a divined ideology i.e. Islam and will basically turn the whole world into prosperous life.

With regard to celebrating the Christian New Year, this is part of the Western culture that is imposed on the Muslims. In imposing such culture, the West intended for the Muslims to accept and recognize the Christian rituals, and believe in the equality of Christianity with Islam. The Prophet (saw) warned Muslims in imitating the cultures of Jews and Christians. In an authentic hadith reported by Abu Saed Al-Khudry said that the Prophet (saw) said «لَتَتَّبِعُنَّ سَنَنَ مَنْ قَبْلَكُم شِبْرًا بشبْر، وذراعًا بذراع، حتَّى لو سَلَكُوا جُحْر ضَبٍّ لَسَلَكْتُمُوهُ»؛ قلنا: يا رسول الله؛ اليهودُ والنَّصارى؟ قال النَّبيُّ ﷺ: «فَمَن؟» “You will indeed follow the ways of those before you, hand span by hand span, and an arm’s length after another. Even if they enter into a lizard’s hole, you will follow them. We asked, is it the Jews and the Christians? He (saw) replied, “who else!” (Muslim)

In their war against Islam, some secular oppressive regimes such as Russia have reached to an extent to put any Muslim who does not celebrate the Christian holidays into police custody! In 2015 inside the Bermoral City Court of Sverdlovsk County, the verdict was passed in the case of “the call for Muslims not to celebrate non-Islamic holidays”. The court sentenced Elvira Sultana Khamitova to 120 hours of forced labor for spreading a leaflet in social networks regarding the prohibition of Muslims celebrating the traditional Russian festival of the New Year.

The children of this Ummah should therefore renounce all man-made laws and the corrupt statutory system, and to work to change the situation in a radical and holistic manner, by reestablishing the rule of Allah according to what Allah has revealed, and establishing the second Khilafah Rashidah (rightly guided Caliphate) upon the methodology of the Prophethood to which all people will witness a happy and prosperous life.

Written for the Central Media Office of Hizb ut Tahrir by
Shabani Mwalimu
Media Representative of Hizb ut Tahrir in Kenya