Eid al-Adha

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.

The day begins with the communal Eid prayer and a sermon, prayed in the morning in mosques, open grounds and, in the vast crowds of the pilgrimage, at Mina near Mecca; Eid al-Adha's timing is fixed to the climax of the Hajj, so that pilgrims and the whole Muslim world keep it together, the pilgrims completing the rites of the standing at Arafah the day before and the stoning at Mina. Those who are able perform the qurbani or udhiyah, the ritual sacrifice of a sheep, goat, cow or camel, following rules of humane slaughter.

The meat is traditionally divided into three portions: one for the household, one for relatives and friends, and one for the poor, so that the feast is also an act of large-scale charity, and in many countries organised distribution reaches those who rarely eat meat. Muslims dress in their best, visit family, exchange the greeting Eid Mubarak, and give to the needy. The combination, a re-enactment of Ibrahim's submission joined to a systematic sharing of food with the poor, gives the feast its double character as the year's most solemn commemoration and one of its most concrete acts of generosity.