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Edited on Thu Nov-18-10 03:42 AM by onager
I've lived thru several of these festivals, in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. In those countries it is called Eid al-Adha, "feast of the sacrifice."
Preparations start weeks in advance, with herds of goats, sheep etc. being trucked into the cities and parked on the sidewalk for shoppers. Improves the environment immeasurably. Do I need a sarcasm smiley?
Like most everything humans do, Eid al-Adha is a great opportunity for keeping up with the Ahmeds. Or hopefully outdoing them. The kind of animal one buys for sacrifice naturally reflects the amount of money one has. At the low end of the scale - pigeons. (Not right off the street, happily).
At the top end - a cow. Or even better, a camel, very expensive and quite a delicacy. It can also feed a bunch of people. My work commute every day took me thru a string of little farm villages in the Nile Delta.
Whenever I saw a young camel tied up outside the butcher shop, I knew its days were numbered. Young camels are sacrificed because they are not very useful, since they aren't broken to work yet like their older relatives. Camels are pretty rare in the Nile Delta, and the only time I saw them was during Eid al-Adha. Or the other big festival, Eid al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan.
Most middle-class people buy a sheep or goat, though it can take some serious saving in Egypt, where a teacher or fairly high govt. employee makes about US $75 per month.
Then the festival starts! In Cairo and Alexandria, I walked down streets literally flowing with the blood of sacrificed animals, and piled high with their hacked-off limbs. I normally have a strong stomach, but I nearly lost it one day walking around Alexandria. The blood, the stench, the bellowing and wailings of the animals being killed - it just got to be too much and freaked me right out. Fortunately, in Alexandria I could be walking along the Mediterranean in a few minutes, which is exactly what I did. In Cairo there was pretty much no escape.
One day my Egyptian co-workers (who rode to work with me) wanted to stop at a village butcher shop. The butcher was about to sacrifice a goat for the Eid. He asked if I wanted to watch the ritual sacrifice, up close and personal. Since I had a nasty dose of flu that day, I already felt bad enough and declined this honor.
Well, it wasn't much of a ritual. He grabbed the goat by one leg, dragged it bleating and bucking to the front of our car, and cut its throat right there on the ground.
A bunch of little kids immediately ran over, dipped their hands in the fresh blood, and had a great time leaving bloody hand-prints all over the walls, trees and any other inanimate object they could reach.
I tried to imagine what an American Mom would think of that, and decided that the world would not have enough Lysol in it for her to get those hands clean.
And that was apparently common during the Eid. I once sat down in a small sidewalk restaurant in the middle of Alexandria, and too late noticed some bloody little handprints on the wall near my table. Fortunately, I was having fish.
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