Islam’s Bloody Celebration

Travel Stories: At the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice in Jordan, Rolf Potts unearths the quirky, intimate face of an Islamic world you won't find on the news

10.03.01 | 12:59 AM ET

In the wake of the September 11th attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, many Americans have jumped to the sad conclusion that Islam is a savage, blood-soaked religion. This is because, for the most part, so many of us only know our Muslim

neighbors through a media machine that portrays them as little more than cartoon-like radicals.

When I think of Islam and blood, however, I don’t think of extremism and hatred. Instead, I think of a certain morning ferry ride that took me across the Gulf of Aqaba early last year. It was the start of a day that will always remind me why we should travel, because—in its own, quirky way—it was a day that made the Islamic world more human to me.

Since I hadn’t had time to change my clothes that morning, I’d arrived at the Jordanian customs station in the port of Aqaba with the bloodstains still on my pants. The blood had dried to the point where I didn’t look like a fresh mass-murderer, but no doubt I seemed a bit odd walking through the ferry station with scallop-edged black droplets on my boots and crusty brown blotches soaked up into the cuffs of my khakis.

The blood was from the streets of Cairo, which at the time had been in the midst of celebrations marking the Islamic Feast of the Sacrifice, known locally as the Eid al-Adha.

As with everything in Cairo, the Eid al-Adha had been an inadvertent exercise in chaos. For the entire week leading up to the holiday, the alleys and rooftops of the city had filled up with noisy, nervous knots of livestock brought in for the feast. Cairenes paid little mind as cattle munched clover outside coffeeshops, goats gnawed on empty Marlboro packs in alleyways, and skittish sheep rained poop down from apartment building balconies. For Egyptians, this preponderance of urban livestock was part of the excitement of the feast—and it was certainly no stranger for them than putting a decorated tree inside one’s house in anticipation of the holidays.

In Islamic societies, the Eid al-Adha is a four-day feast that commemorates Abraham’s near-murder of his son Ishmael to prove his obedience to God. Since tradition tells us that Allah intervened at the last minute and substituted a ram for Ishmael, Muslim families celebrate the Eid by slaughtering their own animal for the feast.

Consequently, on the first morning of the Eid, all of the thousands of sheep, cows and goats that had been accumulating in Cairo during the week were butchered within the span of a few bloody hours. In keeping with tradition, devout Islamic families were instructed to keep a third of the butchered meat for themselves, give a third to friends and family, and distribute the final third to the poor. For Muslims, it was a quaint and honorable ritual.

For infidel visitors like myself, however, the Feast of the Sacrifice had seemed much more like a Monty Python vision of pagan mayhem. This had less to do with the intent of the holiday than with the fact that Cairo is a very crowded city where almost nothing quite goes as planned. Thus, on the first morning of the Eid, the lobby of my hotel resonated with vivid second-hand reports of gore: the lamb that panicked on the balcony at the last minute and avoided the knife by tumbling five stories to the alley below; the cow that broke free from its restraints with its throat half-slit and lumbered through the streets spraying blood for ten minutes before collapsing; the crowd of little girls who contagiously started puking as they watched the death spasms of their neighbor’s sheep.

Regardless of how accurate these stories were, there was no disputing that free-flowing blood was as common as Christmas mistletoe on the first morning of the Eid. By the middle of that afternoon in Cairo, puddles of blood stood like rainwater around drain-pipes, and door-jambs and minivans alike were smeared with clotted red-brown hand-prints.

I’ll admit that there was much more to the Muslim Feast of the Sacrifice than public displays of carnage. Unfortunately, Cairo had a way of drawing my attention away from nuance and subtlety. By the end of the day, I was so accustomed to seeing blood that I didn’t even realize that my pants and boots had been stained until I boarded an overnight bus headed for the Gulf of Aqaba.

For most Westerners, Islam is a religion that doesn’t quite make sense. No doubt this is in large part the result of the Western press, which tends to portray Islam only in terms of its most extreme and violent factions.

When I first traveled into the Islamic world, I’d hoped that the Arabs’ legendary hospitality would break down such barriers of religious understanding in a direct and personal way.

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Columnist Rolf Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. This story was a notable selection in the "Best American Travel Writing 2002" Anthology.


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