In keeping with the times: Sliema’s high street now speaks Maltese

IL-MILIED IT-TAJJEB has taken over from the usual MERRY CHRISTMAS, even though nobody actually says it, not even the floods of Taghna Lkollers who are swarming in in droves and buying up ‘flets’ there.

Maybe they’ve done it so that former Labour Party treasurer Joe Sammut’s clients, with their residence visas obtained in return for ‘investing’ in 100,000 euros of boxed chocolates and orange juice in cartons, will feel at home when they emerge from their flats at Tigne Point and Fort Cambridge to find Arabic well wishes for the birth of Mohammed strung up across the shopping centre.

I suppose not many people stop to ask themselves why Milied means ‘birth’ not ‘Christmas’ and yet we don’t say whose birth exactly, while the name of who was born is actually right there in Christmas. When you say ‘Christmas’ you know whose day you’re marking.

It’s because Milied is the name of yet another Muslim religious day/ritual which Maltese incorporated to accommodate Christianity on conversion from Islam – just like Ghid and Randan, and just like the Maltese word for Friday (il-Gemgha). Milied is the name of the festival of the birth of the Prophet Mohammed, used in Malta for the festival of the birth of Jesus, but without mentioning him.

And it’s been taken intact, too, from Islam – because the noun for ‘birth’ in Maltese is ‘twelid’ and not ‘mwelid’, and so strictly speaking the Maltese name for Christmas should be Twelid Kristu.

Maltese culture is so weird – hating and fearing Muslims and Islam and Arabic speakers, while speaking a form of Arabic and using, without any irony or insight at all, the names of Muslim religious festivals for Christian celebrations.

I suppose the best we can do is to think of it as highly amusing.