Eid Qurbani: The sacrifice and the slaughter

Eids are different from each other. The sacred and the ceremonial, the celebratory and the circumstantial all mingle together to produce our Eids and they are here to stay. Eid ul Fitr comes at the end of Ramadan where people are rewarded with a festival, having fasted for a month and shown restraint in every aspect of life.

The Bakr Eid comes at the end of the Hajj and is a celebration of having completed the pilgrimage obligatory for all Muslims. So it's this mixing that is going on for hundreds of years that has ultimately become our Eids of today. As we celebrate, let's also remember that hundreds have died at Hajj this year so the animal sacrifices and celebrations should be a bit muted and honour the dead as well.

Pilgrimages are part of every tradition, secular or religious, and Islam is no different. Historical records show that the Holy Kaaba was revered from the pre-Islamic era so there is a continuity that makes the journey for the faithful so significant.

For both Christians and Muslims, there are several holy sites, particularly in the Middle East, centred around Jerusalem. The third holiest site of Islam is the Al-Aqsa mosque, but that place has been engulfed by politics and has already caused much violence. One can never say if the roots of political violence are entirely religious or secular, but we see the growing intensity of violence in the Middle East.

It's a matter of some irony that the most violent part of the world is precisely that zone where all the religions that claim to uphold peace publicly, were born.

The message of peace is therefore dependent not only upon the message or the messenger but the followers as well.

Hajj has always been a sacred duty for Muslims everywhere, but the distance between Mecca and India is high, and in the early days when Islam first came to India, much greater.

So the number of Indian Hajjis were never many, although contact between Arabia and India is an ancient one. But these people were traders and beyond the secular exchange, not much else took place.

It was from the 16^th century onwards that we begin to see contact of the religious variety and by the time the British were established, the first Hajis had started to go to Makkah. It is these hajis who also had interesting encounters with the politico-religious activists of Saudi Arabia that shaped the colonial history of India.

Saudi Arabia was undergoing a great upheaval around this time and the Wahhabi activists challenged the traditional rulers and accused them of "heresy" and overthrew them.

This successful Wahhabi insurrection also influenced and inspired several Indians who were there to perform Hajj and they returned home with a desire to challenge the British rule in India.

By the early 19^th century, India saw a series of anti-British movements and the most extensive movement was the Wahhabi resistance in Bengal, led by Haji Shariatullah, and followed by Titu Mir and others like him.

It spread across British Bengal and the villages and peasants participated in this mass movement at a level we would not see till 1971. To a great extent this resistance was fuelled by contacts made, and teachings delivered during Hajj and so the impact of Hajj on our life is enormous.

If the Pakistan army had known that Bengali Muslims had such a long history of rebellions and that the tiny helpless looking villages had a long memory of fighting back, they would not have been so optimistic on the night of the 25^th March.

But times have changed and today Qurbani Eid is much more about sacrificing animals and feasting beyond reason than piety. It has become for some as an opportunity to show off their wealth which militates against the very spirit of Islam and the Hajj.

A pilgrimage is a journey of being humbled by the grace of God and certainly not about bragging rights of the price of soon to be slaughtered cows.

But how we behave at this Eid is not is not in isolation from how we behave the rest of the year in other aspects of our lives.

It's not about animal rights or the hugely unhygienic situation that is created by wanton slaughter of animals, but an attitude of conspicuous consumption bordering on the obscene.

This will not just go way as it is now rooted deeply inside us and so we need to cleanse our soul before we clean the streets of the rotting intestines of the slaughtered animals.

Let us hope we have celebrated Bakr Eid in such a manner that the unholy and greedy demons inside us are slaughtered and not just the animals bought from the market.

Our condolences to all who have lost their near and dear ones and hope they may find peace.

Eid Mubarak

Afsan Chowdhury is a bdnews24.com columnist.