Our ex-pat Thanksgiving was wonderful. Matt organized a potluck with loads of delicious food and even shelled out the equivalent of $35 to purchase a turkey, which he did an excellent job preparing. There is so much for which to be thankful this year: all the new friends I’ve made here, my old friends and my family back in the states, good health, not needing to battle my way through the current job market...The only untraditional element to our Thanksgiving celebration was that it took place on Friday, rather than Thursday, because the former was a day off from school in preparation for the Islamic holiday, Eid al-Adha (Holiday of Sacrifice). In Morocco, as in several other countries, the celebration is known as Eid al-Kabeer, or the Greater Holiday – in relation to the breaking of the fast after Ramadan, which constitutes the Lesser Holiday.
On the lunar calendar, Eid al-Kabeer falls on the tenth day of the last month of the year, Dhu al-Hijjah, and right in the middle of the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca. Interestingly, when I asked one of our Arabic teachers about the relation between the two events, she could only shrug her shoulders and admit that she wasn’t quite sure. The internet hasn’t been of great help either. After wading through a number of vaguely worded sites, however, as well as the Old Testament and the Qur’an, here’s what I understand to have been going on:
Back in the day, there was this guy called Ibrahim (Abraham). And Ibrahim, he was kind of a big deal. God was pretty excited about him. “[F]orbearing, tender-hearted, and devout,” Ibrahim did things like build altars to God at a time when his contemporaries were engaging in such distasteful activities that eventually avenging angels had to be sent to destroy them (Qur’an 11:75).
With Ibrahim, on the other hand, God was so pleased that he promised on several occasions that the Ibrahimic seed would flourish into many a great people.
Now, the immediate products of said seed are important when we’re talking about Islamic history and Eid al-Kabeer. Whereas Jews and Christians trace their lineage back to Abraham through Isaac, the patriarch’s second son, mothered by Sarah, Muslims see themselves as descendents of his first son, Ismail.
Ishmael’s mother was Hajar, Sarah’s handmaiden and (according to Muslims) Ibrahim’s second wife, to whom the task of producing a child fell when it appeared that Sarah was infertile. Once Sarah conceived, however, she decided that maybe she didn’t want Hajar and son around after all and asked that they be sent away. Ibrahim conceded the request and left the two in the middle of the desert with a vessel or two of water. It being the desert, the water didn’t last all that long, leaving Hajar to run frantically about in search of water, before God finally revealed to her the well of Zamzam. Islamic tradition identifies this water source as the basis for the sacred city of Mecca.
Mecca, of course, is the destination of the Hajj, and part of the pilgrimage rituals consist in a symbolic reenactment of the actions of Hajar: running seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah, near the central shrine, and drinking from the Zamzam well. (Due to the masses of people now performing the pilgrimage each year, though, the “running” takes place within air-conditioned tunnels, with a special lane for the disabled and elderly and with actual running allowed only inside a designated area. The well water is made available to pilgrims via a number of coolers placed around the central mosque.)
Other ritualistic actions likewise derive from this foundational family but from a different story, namely, Ibrahim’s near-sacrifice of his son to God.Within the Jewish and Christian traditions, the unlucky child was Isaac, son of Sarah, but, in keeping with the Islamic emphasis on Hajar and Ismail, Muslims assert that it was Ismail who came close to falling under his father’s knife. As support, they point out that in Genesis 2:22, God requests the only son of Ibrahim; given that Isaac was the second son and therefore could never have been an only son, the text must be referring to Ismail.
Whichever the I-name, all three monotheistic (or Abrahamic…) religions agree that the divine demand for a son constituted a pretty extreme-o test of Ibrahim’s faith that the patriarch proceeded to knock out of the ballpark. When God sent the devil to lead him astray prior to the sacrifice, for instance, Ibrahim responded virtuously by hurling stones at him on three occasions. He was prepared to carry out the deed right up until the last minute, “when he had laid his son down on the side of his face” (Qur’an 37:103).
Enter: sheep!
Rather than allow Ibrahim to slay Ismail, God “ransomed his son with a momentous sacrifice” – a sheep that Ibrahim slaughtered in honor of God (Qur’an 37:107).
This story, then, is why a) Hajj pilgrims throw stones at three symbolic pillars (replaced in 2004 by long walls with basins below to catch the bajillion pebbles) and b) there were sheep everywhere in Fes last week.
Although the most significant context within which a Muslim can perform Eid al-Adha is the Hajj (where pilgrims can now purchase vouchers and have a butcher carry out the sacrifice for them at a central location), Muslims all over the world observe this holiday from the comfort of their very own living room.
Families save up for weeks and months to purchase a sheepie, which at a minimum of 3000 dirhams (almost 400 dollars) can still be prohibitively expensive for many. This disparity in wealth does not go overlooked, however, as one of the central acts of the holiday is the donation of at least half the meat and edible organs to the poor.So money is saved. The sheep (or a goat, if money is tight, or a cow, if it’s not) is procured. It moves into the family home sometime in the week before the holiday.
“There are sheep in our basement,” reported Abby.
“We have a cow upstairs,” moaned Anissa. “It has sad eyes and refuses to moo.”
No signs of animal life in our building until the morning of the Eid. “Does someone have little kids upstairs?” Cath asked, in response to a pitter-pattering coming from the direction of the ceiling. Pause. Mutual look of realization, followed by part horror/part mirth.
We didn’t stay around to watch the neighborhood proceedings, however, but rather cabbed down to the medina mid-morning, to the home where our Fulbright friends Rod and Andrew have been living for the past couple months. When we arrived, at 10:30 or 11:00, their host mother, who was bustling around making kitchen preparations, plunked us onto the living room couches and served us tea. The dining table had been moved, and so there was a large open space in front of us where the sacrifices were taking place.
Abdullah, their host father, was the main player. Assisting him was his brother, who brings his family to Fes from Mohammedia, near Casablanca, just a handful of times during the year, for holidays and such. The uncle’s six-year-old boy was scampering around, trying to help. His daughter, maybe ten, had hid in another room, out of sight of the slaughter. Iman, too, the boy’s sixteen-year-old host sister, looked mildly repulsed, although their gentle, nineteen-year-old host brother Nabil had managed to steel his stomach to lend a hand for the first time this year. An uncle from the mother’s side reposed on the couches and every once in a while slipped us his i-Touch-y device to share some random video or song or another.
By this point, mid-morning, Abdullah had already acted the butcher for several families in the area and he and his brother were gutting the first of their own two sheep. They made quick work of it; within minutes, a red carcass dangled from an indoor window, and sheep number two was being led out of the bathroom, barricaded off with a couple wooden planks, and into the living room.“They know what’s coming. The second ones,” someone had commented to me during the week. And indeed, the sizable ram did not appear super thrilled with where his morning was headed. It took Abdullah, his brother, and Rod and Andrew’s gentle, nineteen-year-old host brother Nabil a good bit of wrangling to wrestle it onto the ground and hold the creature relatively still for Abdullah’s newly sharpened kitchen knife to do its work.
Theoretically, the kill requires no more than two quick slashes of the knife along the sheep’s major neck arteries. Moroccans say that the technique represents the most humane way to end its life. In practice, though, there is typically some sawing involved. Even the Moroccan king, whose sacrifice was televised at 9:00 that morning, was said to have botched the job and been forced to hack away somewhat longer than prescribed. Not that such difficulties should be any great surprise: these are men who learned to kill an animal by watching their fathers do it while growing up.
The sheep continued to kick and butt for a while afterward, maybe a minute or two. But Nabil told me later that these movements were insignificant, since the creature’s soul had already left its body. I don’t know what to think. Were the convulsions just the body running on automatic, the way a chicken will run around for a while even after its head is cut off? Or is this knifing not in fact the most painless way to slaughter an animal? I leave the question to the scientists.Death throes concluded and blood squeegee-d into the giant drain built into the living room expressly for this purpose, the men set about preparing the cadaver for consumption.
First, they attached the body upside-down to a hook on the ceiling, lashing its back legs up and out of the way and exposing the most giant set of testicles I have ever seen. Second, Abdullah lacerated the knee tendons on the front legs to facilitate cutting off the shins, while his brother began removing the hide. This process looked like nothing so much as helping a dinner guest squeeze his way out of an overly tight jacket. Tugging downward aggressively and punching at the spot where skin meets flesh with the butt of his knife, the brother eventually succeeded in denuding the creature. I couldn’t help but think of the sheepskin blanket I toted around with me for years and years of my childhood as I watched Nabil take the blood-stained wooly pelt outside, to be delivered later to the medina tanneries.
The third step consisted of Abdullah manhandling the pink and – I imagine – still warm body so that it fell at an angle from the ceiling into his lap, allowing him to slice open the soft belly. He then released the body back into a vertical swing and leaned down to assist the internal organs in spilling out of the body. The intestines are long: drawing them out hand over hand looked just like that clown trick wherein the clown pulls an impossibly long ribbon out of his mouth – more and more and more. I think it got set aside to be used later or given to the butcher.The liver and heart received more immediate attention. Cut up into bite-sized pieces and given a first round of barbecuing on a tiny, one-foot-long charcoal grill set out in the front stoop, we slid them onto skewers in groups of five. Some we made plain, while others involved wrapping the chunk of meat in a white piece of fat that Nabil’s aunt had spiced with cumin and paprika. The giant stack was then transported to grill for full barbecuage.
For the two Moroccan families, these kebabs – folded into a piece of bread – constituted their lunch. But Rod and Andrew’s host mom has seen enough of weird American eating habits that apparently she felt obliged to cook up a little greenery and surprised us all by emerging from the kitchen with a giant platter of salad: olives, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumber, carrots… We were already gathered around separate tables, us Americans and the Moroccans, and now we had different meals – a set-up that made me somewhat uncomfortable, even though I think it was just a way of honoring us as guests. At any rate, we were still able to dip into the mountain of kebabs, which were – let me say – absolutely delicious. Especially the ones with fat melted all over them.We hung around for a while longer, sipping tea, lounging and chatting. From what I heard from Rod, it sounded like those couple hours were a sort of microcosm of the rest of the day, as well as of the following two: lots of meat eating, lots of hanging out with family and friends. Definitely a holiday. Indeed, walking back through the medina, the atmosphere reminded me of an alternate-dimensiony Christmas, wherein all the shop fronts were closed up, everyone had spent the morning in their own home doing family things and now, in the early afternoon, they were maybe venturing out to meet up with friends in the handful of open cafés. Granted, all these people doing the café sitting were men, and there were stacks of charred sheep heads smoking on the cobblestones… but still. There was a quiet festiveness in the air.
Rod and Andrew’s family very kindly invited us over for another meal or two; the truth was, though, that post-Thanksgiving feast and post-heart-attacks-on-a-stick, our tummies needed a recovery period. Cath and I spent the rest of the four-day weekend puttering around the apartment, reading, watching a movie, doing some Arabic homework. And I think we both belatedly added the warmth and generosity of this family to our “things we’re thankful for” lists.
Rod, sheepie #2, Andrew.
Me helping Nabil and his aunt wrap fat around the liver and heart to make kebabs. Yum.
Nabil, displaying liver ready for grilling, and the carcass formerly known as sheep.Photo credits:
Ottoman illumination of Ibrahim and Ismail (http://krimo666.blogspot.com/2009/08/etude-ishmael-et-sa-descendance.html)
Persian fresco of Ibrahim and Ismail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fresco_Binding_of_Isaac_muslim.jpg)
Sheep (http://www.how-to-draw-funny-cartoons.com/cartoon-sheep.html)
Ottoman illumination of Ibrahim and Ismail (http://krimo666.blogspot.com/2009/08/etude-ishmael-et-sa-descendance.html)
Persian fresco of Ibrahim and Ismail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Fresco_Binding_of_Isaac_muslim.jpg)
Sheep (http://www.how-to-draw-funny-cartoons.com/cartoon-sheep.html)
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