This post will detail the holiday of Eid Al-Kabir, the Muslim holiday commemorating Abraham's willingess to sacrifice his son to God - & God's intervention (remember, all three 'religions of the Book' - Judaism, Christianity, & Islam). Abraham was willing to completely surrender himself to God, and God, knowing that Abraham, of course, loved his son, refused to allow him. So he sent a sheep instead to sacrifice. And so, once a year (in the Islamic yearly calendar, which is 11 days shorter than our yearly calendar), Muslims sacrifice a sheep & give part of it to the poor and eat the rest of it.
Being a young American from the suburbs in the Midwest, I'll be honest & say right away that I don't like to see dead animals. Most dead animals I have encountered have been on the highway or have been pets of mine that I have loved & so treated like another human being. I don't like meat too much, and - like lots of people my age - I had a little vegetarian streak. So I was not particularly looking forward to this holiday- I much prefer Eid El-Sagheer, which culminates Ramadan (the month of fasting during daylight hours) & is really a joy to celebrate.
Tunisians - and I'll talk here about Tunisians in Tunis, since I have only witnessed their holiday festivities - buy their sheep before Eid Al Kabir, perhaps by a day or by a few weeks. Why wait until the day before? Well, because most Tunisians here seem to keep the sheep in their garden or in some special room in their house, & you can imagine what happens without a sheep litterbox (not to mention the smell and the baa-ing). Those people who do buy their sheep in advance may want to get a better price, and fatten their sheep up by themselves before butchering day. The sheep also strangely become a centerpiece of daily life up until Eid: little kids play with their sheep in the road, tying red ribbons around their heads. They name their sheep & parade them around together in the streets on little leashes. It's really cute. Of course, the Western, semi-vegetarian, packaged meat purchaser in me found the little kids & their sheep both endearing & truly unsettling. How could such little kids name their sheep & the next day eat it for lunch?
The Ghorbels chose to buy their sheep just the day before Eid, which I was grateful for. I took a picture with the sheep the morning of Eid, after prayers at the mosque (pretty much like Christmas mass, right?), & then Karim & his dad had an argument about where exactly on the sheep's throat you had to cut. Just like some Jews only eat kosher meat, Muslims eat halal meat. The method of killing is reportedly the same: you slit the throat of the animal, disconnecting its head from its body so that pain is minimal, and you let the animal bleed out, resulting in healthier meat. You also say "Bismallah" when you slit the throat of the animal, "In God's name," as a sort of sign of respect to the source of all goods. I think about it much like what Catholics do before they eat: we say, "Bless us oh Lord, & these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from Thy bounty, through Christ Our Lord, Amen." One is shorter, & the butcher does it exponentially more than anyone else.
After the Ghorbels finally settled on asking the butcher to slaughter (or sacrifice) the sheep, they found two men whom another neighbor had contacted. Apparently downtown, butchers walk through the streets crying, “Zazeer!” and sharpening their knives loudly together. Instead, in the Ghorbel’s upper middle class suburbs, the neighbors “civil-ly” argued over whom the pair of butchers would help next. For 20 dinars, the butcher slit the sheep’s throat, sliced a hole in the flesh & blew up its body so that the skin would easily come off, and then finally removed the skin, peeling it off with a little help from their knives. It was surprisingly easy and I was surprised that I could watch everything & feel minimally queasy. I almost felt more honorable, assisting in the hopefully humane slaughter of the food I would later eat. It made me think of the Native American Indian traditions I have studied in grade school, which stood in such stark contrast to our ways of consuming meat.
After they removed the skin, the butchers left & the real work began. The Ghorbels knew how
to cut apart the animal, and so they cut out most of the organs & left the rest of the meat out to dry. It is amazing how much steam comes out of the body when you cut into it.
I suddenly realized that – much like Michael Scott on his personal wildnerness retreat (see the first 2 minutes of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCoJgf5Xyjc) – I really couldn’t survive on my own in the wild. I am really dependent on other people’s expertise.
Eid Al-Kabir is lots of work. I helped slice the organ meat into little pieces for “hosbane,” which is handmade sausage (made with the sheep’s intestines, meticulously cleaned by Essia and Nahed) stuffed with organs and parsley. Though organs are supposed to contain lots of nutrients, I couldn’t bring myself to eat anything much more than the liver. The smell of meat, much like at the butcher, didn't encourage my appetite.
For lunch, we ate assida with meat (liver & some chicken just for me), the liver as fresh as it comes. I put honey on the assida – that itself is actually a breakfast dish – and I ate more assida than meat.
For dinner, we had hosbane (stuffed intestines).
The next day, when most people seemed to be out visiting, we sliced up the rest of the meat that had remained hanging the previous day. We grilled it on a tiny grill in the backyard. This meal was actually really delicious – I guess we would call it barbecued lamb.
I talked with the Ghorbels about how they felt as kids when they saw the sheep slaughtered. They all told me that they had cried, because they felt bad for the sheep. Even as they got older, they would still tear up & feel pity for the sheep. There is a social strategy to deal with children's feelings of pity for the sheep; families tell young children not to cry for the sheep, because the sheep are happy that they will be sacrificed for Eid. [This reminded me of Santa Claus - all children will get presents on Christmas because Santa ensures moral logic.] But, I think, being human & conditioned to have other types of relationships with animals, they do feel pity. But, as one Tunisian told me, he always knew where his meat came from, and after his first tearful refusal to eat on Eid, he forgot about the sheep and enjoyed the barbecued meat.
All in all, Eid Al-Kabir was the most culturally ‘strange’ celebration I have yet participated in, and it was also the one that taught me the most. It really underlined for me what I still don’t know & how unequipped I am for other ways of living (as in perhaps the ways of my great grandparents).
Posts
