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

I told Mohammed that it was indeed fun, but this was a lie. As with freeze-tag, heavy petting and bingo, many exercises in human joy are best appreciated at a very specific age. To truly understand the appeal of drinking beer and dancing with your buddies in bland resort-town hotel room, I suspect you have to be 16 years old. I danced half-heartedly to the music, politely waiting for it to stop.

When I sat down after the first song, Mohammed happily yanked me to my feet. Twenty minutes later, the young Jordanians had moved on to the side B songs without any sign of fatigue. I weakly shuffled in place, desperate for an excuse to leave. It occurred to me that, technically, I could just sprint out of the room and never have to talk to these guys again.

Then, the inspiration hit. Leaning across the bed, I shut off the boom box and unplugged it from the wall. Mohammed and his friends looked at me in confusion.

“Let’s go,” I said to them. Carrying the boom box with an air of authority, I led the Jordanian boys up the stairwell to the roof of the Petra Hotel. There, I introduced them to Anna, Kat, Amber and Judith.

Serendipity is a rare thing, so it must be appreciated even in its humbler forms. Mohammed, Sayeed and Ali had probably never been that intimate with Western women in their lives. As they exchanged formal handshakes with the Danes and Canadians, I saw that their faces were frozen into expressions of rapturous terror. Perhaps charmed by the boys’ awkwardness, the girls regarded the young Jordanians with sisterly affection.

I plugged in the boom box and announced that it was time to dance.

I’m not sure if that evening on the roof of the Petra Hotel meant much to any of the parties involved, but I’d like to think that it was an all-around triumph: Anna and Kat were able to interact with Arabs in a charmed, unthreatening setting; Amber and Judith got to boss the boys around in colloquial Arabic and showcase their Bedouin dance-steps; Mohammed, Sayeed and Ali—in their goofy, reverent, 16-year-old way—got to dance with angels on the roof of Aqaba.

For me, however, the night was a technical failure: I’d come to Jordan to experience the Islamic soul of the Eid al-Adha, and I’d ended up spearheading a secular sock-hop on the roof of my hotel.

But, at a very basic level, I was just experiencing another human facet of the Muslim world—a facet that in itself was a bona fide extension of the Feast of the Sacrifice. After all, any holiday—when stripped of its identifying traditions and theologies—is simply an intentional break from the drab routines of life: a chance to eat or drink hearty with family and friends; an opportunity to give thanks to God or fate or randomly-converging odds; a date to anticipate with optimism or recall with satisfaction.

This in mind, I’d reckon that the ritual intricacies of feasts and festivals anywhere are mere decoration for a notion we’re usually too busy to address: that, at the heart of things, being alive is a pretty good thing.

Six stories over Aqaba, the eight of us talked and joked and danced to the Arabic tunes, improvising our moves when we weren’t sure what else to do.


Tags: Best American Travel Writing, Islam, Middle East, Jordan

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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