Qurbani

Qurbani (also udhiya) is the sacrifice of a permitted animal, a sheep, goat, cow or camel, offered at Eid al-Adha, the festival of sacrifice that falls during the pilgrimage season. It commemorates the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his son at God's command and the ram provided in the son's place, an event the Quran recounts, and it is performed after the festival prayer on the appointed days.

The tradition directs that the meat be divided, with a share for the household, a share for relatives and friends, and a share for the poor, so that the sacrifice is also an act of charity that reaches the whole community. For pilgrims at Mecca the offering is part of the Hajj itself; for Muslims elsewhere it is a parallel observance marking the same festival. The Quran is explicit that what is sought is not the meat or blood but the piety of the one who offers, framing the rite as an act of devotion rather than of feeding God.

Qurbani's narrative basis is the Quranic account, in surah al-Saffat, of Ibrahim's willingness to sacrifice his son at God's apparent command, and God's substitution of a ram at the last moment, a story shared in broad outline with the Genesis account of Abraham and Isaac though the Quran does not name which son is meant, a point classical commentators themselves discussed without reaching full agreement. Long standing custom, though not a fixed legal requirement in the way the sacrifice itself is, divides the resulting meat three ways, a portion for the household performing the sacrifice, a portion for friends and neighbors, and a portion for the poor, a distribution meant to embed the sacrifice in a wider circle of obligation rather than let it end as a private household meal.

The rite's practical form has shifted substantially in recent decades as the pilgrimage itself has grown to accommodate over a million people each year: rather than every pilgrim or household personally slaughtering an animal, many now purchase a share in an animal through organized abattoirs or charitable schemes that carry out the slaughter and distribute the meat, often to the poor in other countries entirely, a delegation of the physical act that some scholars and lay Muslims see as a practical necessity at modern scale and others regard as thinning the personal, willing character the original narrative gives the sacrifice.