Further Notes on Eid al Kabir

I've continued to ask a number of my Moroccan friends and students about the upcoming Eid al Kabir holiday. Yesterday, for instance, only 5 of my 14 students showed up for class. So, rather than pursuing the lesson I had planned, I led the group in a discussion about the holiday, working on the near future ('I'm going to',....'then my family's going to...', 'next we're going to...", etc.)

For Christians encountering the Eid al Adha, the other name for Eid al Kabir, we might wonder why an animal sacrifice is necessary. In Christian theology, the crucifixion of Jesus was a once for all sort of sacrifice that makes further atonement by animal death unnecessary.

However, the most common explanations for the holiday, as I've briefly outlined before, involve aspects other than atonement. Particularly, Moroccans have mentioned 1) remembering Abraham's unquestioning obedience to God, 2) spending time with family, and 3) social solidarity.

In terms of family togetherness, the holiday is a lot like Thanksgiving and Christmas all wrapped up into one. People travel to be with their extended family, often the only time of the year, and they kill an animal and eat it in every imaginable way. After the meal, visits to family and friends in the city take up much of the following few days. For most people, it seems this togetherness is the real point. Theological abstraction is always harder to grasp, I think, than the tangible reality of being with loved ones.

As for social solidarity, Muslims are commanded in the Sunna to give 1/3 of their meat to the poor of society. Sometimes, richer Muslims will even buy whole sheep for poorer families.

But family togetherness and social solidarity aside, that still leaves the question: Why kill a sheep? Why use the most universal act for appeasing God's anger to accomplish these other goals? The way it has been represented to me here puts the main emphasis on the commemoration of Abraham's obedience in his willingness to sacrifice his son out of obedience to God, and not on an attempt to appease God's righteous anger.

Islam's insistence emphasis on submission to God is demonstrated quite powerfully in the story. Abraham submits obediently to God's command to sacrifice his son, despite his reservations. When God sees that Abraham is faithful, he stops him and provides a sheep instead. From a Christian perspective, the foreshadowing of God's own sacrifice of his son and the atonement aspect are missing from this Islamic ritual of the sheep killing, but Christians should be able to appreciate the commemoration of unwavering obedience to God, even if the content and means of that obedience takes different forms in Islamic and Christian theology.