Eid al-Adha, the "Festival of Sacrifice", is the greater of Islam's two canonical feasts, kept on the tenth of Dhu al-Hijjah, the month of the pilgrimage, and lasting several days. It commemorates the willingness of the prophet Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son in obedience to a command from God, and God's mercy in ransoming the boy with a ram. The Qur'an recounts the trial in Surah 37, in which father and son both submit and the son consents; God then calls out that Ibrahim has fulfilled the vision, and substitutes "a mighty sacrifice".
One point distinguishes the Islamic account from the biblical one. The Qur'an does not name the son in the sacrifice narrative, and early Muslim scholars were divided; the settled majority view in later Islam is that it was Isma'il (Ishmael), the elder son and, in Islamic tradition, ancestor of the Arabs, rather than Ishaq (Isaac) as in the book of Genesis. The feast reads the episode as the supreme example of islam, submission to God, and of trust that God provides, and it is these, rather than the historical or genealogical questions, that the day is understood to celebrate.