Eid Mubarak!

Yesterday was the Muslim festival Eid al-Adha, that is, the "Festival of the Sacrifice." In essence it is the celebration of Ibrahim's (Abraham in Christian and Jewish theologies) willingness to trust utterly in Allah in sacrificing his own son, Ismail (Ishmael) only to find that he had in fact slit the throat of a goat instead of his beloved only son. There are a couple of good wiki pages out there with further reference on Eid al-Adha and Ibrahim's sacrifice if you want to find out more, but I'd rather blog about what this has meant for me, personally.

There has been great changes in Dhaka city over the last few days. Many streets in the heart of the city have become cattle markets, where families can buy a cow, goat or other livestock, for them to sacrifice to Allah. (This has not been easy for me to live with.*) Some of these animals are huge and would easily dwarf a regular English sized cow. They also, somewhat strangely have humps on their backs, just behind their shoulders. The animals have been shipped in on huge yellow lorries, to be sold from the street corners. There are white ones, brown ones, big ones and small, but all are eventually sold for people to take back to their houses, where (at least in my neighbourhood) they are tied up to a convenient tree and closely looked after, day and night, by the residents; fed, watered and cleaned before eventually being dressed up with colourful garlands around their necks, horns and humps to celebrate the sacrifice.

The meat does not go to waste after the sacrifice. There are quite strict rules as to how the meat is divided up between the family, the extended family and the poor, with each being given it's equal third of the meat. Around 5pm yesterday, about an hour before sunset, there was a great commotion in the streets around my apartment, with young children and mothers running and shouting trying to find the next house that was performing the sacrifice, in the hope of acquiring a small portion of the third allocated to the poor.

Today I ventured out to Gulshan in the hope of picking up some bread and washing up liquid, which despite most of the shops being closed today, I did eventually manage to do. On my travels I noticed three important things. Firstly, it was extraordinarily quiet. I had heard that many families leave the city and travel to the villages of their roots for Eid, but it really was very very empty in town. Secondly, that with the small exception of a very occasional pedestrian walking the suburbs with a bag of meat, that you really wouldn't know that anything important had happened yesterday at all. And finally, that once into the centre of Gulshan, near the shops, it was immediately apparent that nothing from these sacrificial animals is wasted, as on every street corner there was a pile of bloodied hides waiting to be bought and made into shoes, or bags or maybe a new rickshaw seat.

* I'm not going to even pretend to understand the theology or doctrine behind what I have seen happening over the last few days. I'm not going to ignore it either; indeed it would be futile to try. As a westerner and a vegetarian, the idea of sacrificing an animal seems to me very unconscionable. However, as an expat, one is always challenged by cultural differences, and one needs to learn to accept them for what they are; deep seated ways of life that to the native Bangladeshi's are nothing out of the ordinary and just the way things are.