Rebuttal to "How Birthday Parties Started"

IMHO, this argument is flawed. Let me take it one step at at time:

The misrepresentation of birthdays as an occasion with religious connotations:
Look at the dictionary definition of the word "festival": An occasion for feasting or celebration, especially a day or time of religious significance that recurs at regular intervals.

"Festival" has a decided religious undertone, and mostly a public one as well. All the ahadith quoted here and the sunnah mentioned is clearly aimed at establishing an identity for the Muslim ummah through quashing public celebrations that contravened the religous spirit of Islam. Different practices relates to different modes of worship, different focii of public life. All the events mentioned are "festivals of the people", and Muslims are warned against these because they infringe on our identity. Truly, if we celebrated Christmas in the same spirit as Christians do, then what will be the difference between us?

A birthday is mostly a private, family-oriented celebration. You can find the roots of any current human practice in ancient religions. Of course, it is very well documented that nearly everything that people of the pre-Rennaisance world did was guided by religion or superstition, whatever you want to call it, because so little was understood of the world. Lightening, sunrise, floods, crops, everything was accorded to some supernatural entity or force. But my celebration of a birthday is has no pagan religious overtones. In fact, I thank Allah for His gifts to my loved one and me. It is an event only in that I take time to convey to a person my appreciation of them, to explicate that I care for them, and no more. I do not wish to please Artemis.

Is a birthday always "kosher"? I don't believe so. Islam gives us guidelines, and it is quite clear from the extravagances around us that we don't always obey those guidelines. A wedding can be true to the Islamic spirit, or it can abuse it to no end. So it is with birthdays. On my mother's recent birthday, our family gave her gifts, wished her, told her how much we loved and appreciated her and her role in our life. We cut a simple cake, not to please Greco-Roman gods but to satisfy our own sweet tooth. The tradition of eating sweetmarts on an occasion of joy transcends religion. The Prophet (PBUH) himself encouraged the giving of gifts, because it increases our love and affection of each other. And how does it contravene Islamic spirit, or incur Allah's anger, to appreciate our loved ones and make them happy? One can argue against spending excessive amounts of money on lavish gatherings and even the practice of sending birthday cards, but is it too much to set one token day apart in a year to appreciate our friends and family?

Is it the choice of a particular day that bothers us? We have many other secular, non-Islamic celebration days. Each Muslim country has its own independence day. The celebration of August 14th sets Pakistani Muslims apart from their Ummah, and yet objections are never raised against nationalism. In fact, I don't think any religous leaders ever denied sending the Pakistani people a congratulatory message on the birth of their country, their nation. If this does not ruffle any feathers and generates no email chains, why do we take pleasure in condemning a private celebration of our loved ones?

You will not need to persuade me to denounce extravagance and waste, at birthday parties, weddings, Eid celebrations, or anything else. You do not need to warn me against blindly following every tradition I come across. But birthdays, celebrated with simplicity within the spirit of Islam to appreciate our loved ones and with gratitude to the Creator, are misplaced targets of our search for a Muslim identity, our quest to be better Muslims. The falsehoods are in our minds, not in the birthday. My identity does not lie in a close-minded negation of everything else around me. Islam enriches my life by offering me intellectual freedom to judge what is not explicit in the primary sources of religious law, which is opposite of the stifling dogmatism of orthodox Christianity, Jewism, etc. We spend too much time on the minutia of others and are often blind to the big things that are wrong with our lives :(

Ah, and yes, regarding the brilliant ending note of the forwarded email: With due deference to the Sahaba and the Islamic tradition, I ask you - would you like a United States, a Canada, a Great Britian, where you would be prohibited from celebrating Eid? Read that line again, but in a different light now: "If the Muslims have agreed to prevent them from celebrating openly, how could it be right for the Muslims to celebrate them?"