My Feelings About the Day of Sheep Sacrifice, and How They Have Changed Over the Years

This is the seventh (and last) entry in a week-long series on the Muslim Festival of the Sacrifice.

When I first heard of this ritual, I thought it was barbaric. The first year I came to Morocco, I experienced this ritual and took pictures. It was really horrific, but the pictures were really interesting. I wrote home about the experience (similar to the description of the day here). Not many people replied, but one person who did mentioned it didn’t sound much different than killing an animal on the farm in preparation for winter (which is what she had experienced in America when she was young). At any rate, few Americans under age 70 would have had this experience, which probably makes it seem all the more barbaric to most people.

Different years, I’ve seen different amounts of callousness and different degrees of skill among butchers who have come to kill the sheep. My husband says that no one is thinking about whether the animal suffers (and when this point is brought up by children, they are just told the sheep is “lucky to be chosen, because he goes straight to Paradise.”) The children see the adults celebrating, and then after a few years they get used to seeing an animal killed as a fact of life, thus becoming another generation which is not shocked by it.

At this point, what disturbs me the most is when some butchers begin to skin the animal before it is entirely dead! I am the only person in the family to speak up about this, and my husband tells me, “Don’t disturb the butcher, he’s in a hurry to get to the next house.” I was not there this year, but I was the past few years. Now, I get my brother-in-law (who does listen to me when I bring this up) to take the butcher aside as the butcher is getting things ready, and TELL the butcher that if he has to wait an extra full minute to start skinning the animal until WE are satisfied it is really dead, then he must do so. That way, my husband doesn’t tell me that I’m “bothering the butcher.” So the last three years, I was satisfied about this.

A few women have told me that their husband is sacrificing a cow, or a sheep and a cow! The women don’t like this at all, as it makes a lot more work for them (a cow is a lot bigger than a sheep). I asked my husband about this, and he thinks anyone in Morocco who does this is just “showing off.” However, when I checked the internet, I found in many parts of the Muslim world they are sacrificing a cow, or even a camel, or a goat, depending upon what is the norm in their own community. The animal has to be a male, at least one year old, with perfect horns, and without blemish–not just any sheep will do. Prices of sheep go way up right before the Festival. So anyone in the Christian world who complains of Christmas being too “commercial” can see that the same problem is happening in the Muslim world with this festival.

After seeing this the first time, I recalled being told in Sunday school as a child that Jesus was the supreme sacrifice for all mankind, and that never again was an animal to be sacrificed. So I asked a lot of people for a lot of years about why, when Islam started 600 years after the birth of Christ, would God now “change his mind” and require animal sacrifices? If God is omniscient, it does not make sense that he would make one decision, and then later reverse himself to the opposite!

The standard answer of all Muslims I encountered, or put this question to, is that the Bible is incorrect, and that it has been purposely altered in the past! So then I found myself getting into a lot of debates about how much or how little it may have been changed, and how significant those changes were. Later on, I discovered than NONE of the people I was talking to had ANY real knowledge of the Bible, or of the Christian religion, but were just spouting off about what was said in the Koran.

It has only been in the last couple of years that I finally found someone who gave me a decent answer to this question. This person is a sincere Muslim scholar, a dual-national who understands both the Moroccan and American culture. Basically, she said the issue would never come up under Islam, since Islam believes that Jesus was a prophet, but not the son of God. It is also believed in Islam that Jesus did not really die on the cross, that another was substituted in his place, and that there was no resurrection. Therefore, any questions about the “sacrifice of Jesus for mankind,” are non-existent. If you try ask anyone about obvious historical events, you just get the response that the Bible has been (greatly) falsified.

Some years in school, I have children in my class tell me forcefully (after coming form Arabic class), “Do you know that part of the Christian religion is false?” (referring to the above-mentioned points about Jesus).   Since we are not supposed to discuss religion in school at all, any more if that question ever comes up, I just tell my eight-year-olds that it’s not “polite” to tell people something in their religion is false. I say they can think whatever they want, but they don’t have to say it. My eight-year-olds can understand this perfectly, and it solves the problem.

Today, I came across a really interesting article in the New York Times, which I highly recommend about this festival:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CEFD81030F93AA15750C0A96F958260

Anyone who wants to see that really BAD video I mentioned in a previous post of that terrible woman in Cairo slaughtering sheep in a completely wrong and inhumane way (this is a very disgusting video, so be sure you want to see it), you can see it here (I purposely did not embed the video).

http://youtube.com/watch?v=yqy0VQSbgJ0

But I also want to include the comment a Saudi person left after seeing it, just so that people know that even most Arabs would never do it like this:

“This freaking video is amazing! As an Arab i am embarrassed, by the way she slaughters these animals one of the sheep is still moving around on the ground, this is so WRONG.The other sheep she cut its neck and it started running, WRONG AGAIN and this is happening in an Arab country. Shame, shame shame. I hope my country (Saudi) knows/and does better than this. This is PURE CRUELTY to animals. ya Allah!( may Allah have mercy on her for she knows not what wrong she is doing)”

I want to tell readers that I have never seen anything even remotely approaching this atrocious scene in sixteen years here. Most butchers know what they are doing, and the kill is done properly.

This concludes my series of articles on the Festival of the Sheep Sacrifice.

Madame Monet