Christmas in Afghanistan — Kabul
Dear Santa,
My name is Dawit and I am twelve years old. I live in Kabul, Afghanistan. I am writing this letter in secret, the way we do everything. My family are followers of Jesus Christ, which we do not say outside our home, because in Afghanistan under the Taliban, saying this is dangerous. My father says faith kept in secret is still faith. I believe him, but I also wonder sometimes why faith must be secret at all.
I have three questions.
Do you come to Afghanistan? Does Christmas happen here even though nobody talks about it?
Where exactly is Afghanistan in the world, and why has it always been a place where powerful countries fight each other?
Why does a government decide what a person is allowed to believe?
Thank you.
Dawit
Kabul, Afghanistan
Dear Dawit,
Your letter arrived at the North Pole and every elf in the correspondence division stopped what they were doing when it was read aloud. Not because it was the longest letter we received this December. It is one of the shortest. But a letter written in secret, by a child who celebrates Christmas in secret, who follows Jesus in secret, and who still found the courage to ask three honest questions of someone he has never met — that letter commands a room. You commanded ours. I want to answer every question you asked, carefully and truthfully, because you deserve nothing less.
Do I come to Afghanistan. Does Christmas happen there even though nobody talks about it.
Yes, Dawit. I come to Afghanistan. I have always come to Afghanistan.
What I find there is not decorated trees in windows or lights strung across streets — those things are not available to you, and I understand why, and I want you to know that the absence of decorations has never once meant the absence of Christmas. What I find in Afghanistan is what I found in your letter: faith kept alive in small, quiet, private spaces. A family gathered around something true in a room with the curtains closed. A prayer said in a voice too low for the wrong people to hear. A candle lit not for decoration but because the darkness outside makes a light inside feel necessary and defiant and right.
Organisations like Hope for Afghans document what your community already knows: followers of Jesus in Afghanistan celebrate the birth of Christ on December 25th, quietly, privately, at genuine personal risk. Some give gifts. Some share food. All of them mark the day because the day is worth marking regardless of what any government says about it. Back to Jerusalem, a mission organisation working in closed countries, has written about Afghan Christians celebrating in conditions that would cause most comfortable Christians in comfortable countries to reconsider what the word "celebration" actually means at its minimum required level of courage.
Christmas happens in Afghanistan. It has always happened. It happens wherever one person who loves Jesus decides that the day is worth remembering, regardless of the risk. Your family is Christmas in Afghanistan, Dawit. The curtains-closed prayer is Christmas in Afghanistan. The secret kept for years without being broken is Christmas in Afghanistan. I come to all of it, every year, and I am more moved by what I find there than by almost anything else on the entire route.
Where Afghanistan sits in the world, and why powerful countries have always fought there.
Afghanistan sits at the geographic crossroads of Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East — bordered by Iran to the west, Pakistan to the south and east, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan to the north, and China at its narrow eastern tip. It sits in the middle of every land route connecting these regions, which means that for as long as armies and traders have moved between them, they have had to deal with Afghanistan.
The British Empire fought three Anglo-Afghan Wars between 1839 and 1919, trying to control the mountain passes that separated British India from the expanding Russian Empire — a contest that historians call the Great Game. The Soviet Union invaded in 1979, seeking a southern buffer state and warm-water access, and spent ten years and enormous resources learning what Alexander the Great had learned more than two thousand years earlier and what every subsequent invader has learned since: the geography of Afghanistan — its mountains, its valleys, its tribal structure, its history of defending its own ground — makes it extraordinarily difficult to conquer and impossible to hold. The United States learned this after 2001, as the British and Soviets had before.
Afghanistan's tragedy is partly that it sits exactly where it sits. A crossroads is enormously valuable to the people passing through it. It is considerably harder on the people who live there. The people who have lived there — including your family, Dawit, for generations — deserve better than to be a battlefield for other people's strategic interests. This has been true for centuries. It remains true now.
Why a government decides what a person is allowed to believe.
This is your social studies question and it is the most important one you asked, and I want to answer it with full honesty rather than with diplomatic distance.
Governments that control religious belief do so for the same reason all authoritarian governments control all forms of thought and expression: because a person who is allowed to think freely, believe freely, and speak freely is a person who can compare what they are told by the government to what they observe in their own life and in the world, and reach their own conclusions. A government that cannot survive that comparison must prevent the comparison from happening. Controlling what people are allowed to believe is the most fundamental way of preventing it, because belief shapes everything else — how a person understands justice, what they think they deserve, whether they are willing to accept conditions that a free mind would refuse.
No government in human history has permanently succeeded in controlling what people actually believe inside themselves. They can control what people say. They can punish what people do. They cannot reach inside a person and remove what that person knows to be true. Your father knows this. It is why he keeps the faith even at the price of silence. The Taliban can make Christmas unspeakable in Kabul. It cannot make Christmas untrue. These are very different things, and every government that has ever tried to control belief has eventually discovered the difference, usually by being outlasted by the people it tried to control.
Jesus himself was born in a country occupied by a foreign empire, in a political climate where what he taught was dangerous to say publicly, and where following him eventually cost his earliest followers everything. Your situation is not historically unique. The faith you carry in secret has been carried in secret before, by people who kept it alive under conditions as difficult as yours, and passed it forward to the next generation. You are part of a chain that goes back two thousand years and has survived every government that has tried to break it. I do not say this to minimise what your family risks. I say it so you know the company you are in.
Merry Christmas, Dawit. The North Pole sees your family. The North Pole honours your family. The candle your family lights in a room with the curtains closed is one of the most important lights burning anywhere on Earth this December, and I mean that without qualification or exaggeration.
Your friend,
Santa Claus
The North Pole
P.S. The elves asked me to add something. They asked me to tell you that the gift that matters most this Christmas — the one that requires no sleigh, no delivery, no customs declaration — is already in your home. It arrived two thousand years ago in a stable in Bethlehem, and no government on Earth has been able to confiscate it since. Merry Christmas. https://santaclaus.top/christmas-in-afghanistan/
Comments
Post a Comment