cinder and smoke...whispers around the trees...

Korbani Eid is probably the most incredibly fascinating religious rite I have seen since coming out to Bangladesh. New Year’s Eve we had a good 5 or 6 goats in our garage under our building and other neighborhood garages also had an assortment of bulls and goats laying between cars, snacking on tree branches brought in for them and making a regular stable of the place. On Eid morning, which happened to fall on the 1st this time around, Alana and Sonali and I walked around the neighborhood and watched as butchers carved up the carcasses of sacrificed animals in the streets. Though I had been told that we might get to see one or two animals on each street, I was not prepared for what awaited us. In reality it was more like 5 or 6 animals on each street, in each garage, in each park being sacrificed and slaughtered. Blood literally ran in rivers down the streets and the Imams went from one house to the next in their white Punjabis spattered with blood, carrying their knives to perform sacrifices the whole morning. We got out into the streets at about 10:30 so many sacrifices had already been done and the butchers were hard at work. The tradition of Korbani Eid demands that one third of the meat from the sacrifice is kept for the family, one third is given to friends and neighbors and one third is given to the poor…so the usual beggars were running around in their barefeet through the mud and guts and blood, carrying dirty bags full of their share and dripping with blood.
We stumbled upon a school yard park not too far from our place where a huge white bull was being tied for sacrifice, so we waited around to watch and it was surreal. There was a crowd of people around it and it took 5 men to hobble its feet and then pull it to the ground. The Imam then stepped forward with his knife and had the 5 men hold the bull’s neck open to his knife. As he lifted the blade, the whole crowd began to chant…Al-lah, Al-lah, Al-lah, Al-lah...and as he brought down his knife, he and the crowd together shouted “ALLAH!” And instantly the whole ground and men and bull were covered in bright red blood. All the while I crouched in the wings taking pictures like there was no tomorrow. I can’t quite remember if it was just my own concentration or if the crowd actually became silent, but immediately after the first cut there was the most surreal quiet which must have only lasted a moment, but at the time stretched and pulled until all you could hear was the blood gushing from the animals heart against the Imam’s hands, the clothes of the men holding the bull and pouring into the mud.
As the animal died, I couldn’t help but be amazed by the symbolism. A giant white bull, covered and stained in its own impossibly red blood…the Imam’s starched white Punjabi spattered with that same blood…his knife, dripping blood on to his sandals... The Old Testament stories pulsed in my head. Abraham, Issac, Jacob…this was their sacrifice, their religious tradition and in turn, my religious tradition…alive in this modern city. Rather than experiencing this Eid as something foreign and disturbing –as many foreigners do I’m sure – I can’t help but feel the ties between myself and my Muslim neighbors strengthened and reinforced; this was something familiar to me, I understood it. The spilling of blood, the demand for sacrifice...Allah is not a foreign god to me, but rather remarkably recognizable…a face of the God of the Old Testament, a face of the God that does not flinch at the sacrifice of it’s own son in the Christian faith, a face of the divine that is bigger than any religious tradition gives God credit for being.


*I have put some photos of Eid sacrifice on my photography site – www.flickr.com/photos/fatalcleopatra - but they are not for the faint of heart as they reflect the reality of the sacrifice.