Eid al-Adhaਈਦ ਅਲ-ਅਜ਼ਹਾ

If Eid al-Fitr is the sweet Eid, Eid al-Adha is the solemn one, a festival of obedience, sacrifice and sharing that falls at the most sacred moment of the Muslim year. While two to three million pilgrims complete the Hajj at Mecca, Muslims in every town of Punjab and every corner of the diaspora keep the same festival at home: a morning prayer in their best clothes, the offering of an animal by those who can afford it, and meat carried to the doors of the poor before it reaches their own tables. Its story is among the oldest shared by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, though each tradition tells it in its own way.

What is Eid al-Adha?

Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, is the second of the two great festivals of Islam. It begins on the tenth day of Dhu al-Hijjah, the twelfth and last month of the Islamic calendar, and continues for three or four days, the days of Tashreeq. It is called the Greater Eid, greater in religious weight than Eid al-Fitr, because it stands at the climax of the Hajj, the pilgrimage that is one of the five pillars of Islam, and because the act it remembers is understood as the supreme test of a prophet's obedience. The day is a public holiday across the Muslim world and in India and Pakistan.

The story of Ibrahim's sacrifice

According to Islamic tradition, the prophet Ibrahim, Abraham in the Bible, was commanded by God in a dream to sacrifice his son. The Quran tells the story in its thirty-seventh chapter without naming the son; Muslim tradition identifies him as Ismail, Ishmael, the elder son, where the biblical account names Isaac. Father and son, in the telling, both submitted: the son told his father to do as he was commanded. As Ibrahim raised the knife, God called out that the vision had been fulfilled, and a ram was provided and sacrificed in the son's place. Tradition adds that Satan tried three times to turn the family from the command and was driven off with stones, an episode the Hajj still re-enacts at Mina. For Muslims the point of the story is not the knife but the surrender: Ibrahim's willingness to give up what he loved most, and God's mercy in accepting the willingness instead of the life.

The Hajj connection

Eid al-Adha is fixed to the Hajj. On the ninth of Dhu al-Hijjah the pilgrims stand in prayer at Arafat, the emotional peak of the pilgrimage; on the tenth, the day of Eid, they stone the pillars at Mina, offer their sacrifice, shave their heads or trim their hair, and return to Mecca to circle the Kaaba. Muslims who are not on the pilgrimage share the day from home: the Eid prayer is timed to the morning of the same date, and the takbir, the proclamation of God's greatness, is recited through the festival days. Punjabi pilgrims in Mecca and their families at home in Malerkotla or Multan are, in this way, keeping one festival in two places.

Qurbani: the sacrifice and the sharing

After the Eid prayer, families who can afford it offer the qurbani, also called udhiyah: a sheep or goat for one household share, or a cow or camel shared between up to seven. The animal must be healthy and of a set minimum age, and its slaughter follows the rules of Islamic practice. The meat is then divided into three parts: one for the poor and needy, one for relatives, friends and neighbours, and one for the family itself. The division is the festival's moral in edible form: the sacrifice counts for little, tradition teaches, if the poor do not eat. In modern times many Muslims, especially in the diaspora, arrange their qurbani through charities that perform it where meat is most needed, including in their home towns in Punjab, while families at home still distribute meat street by street.

Eid al-Adha in Punjab

In India the festival is widely known by its other name, Bakrid. In Punjab its public face is the Eidgah and the mosque courtyard on the first morning, when congregations in Malerkotla and in the Muslim quarters of Ludhiana and Jalandhar gather in their best clothes, and the greetings run for hours. In the days before, livestock markets on the edges of Punjabi towns fill with goats and sheep bought for the qurbani, and butchers work their busiest days of the year. Across the border in Pakistani Punjab, Lahore and the province's towns keep the same festival as a major public holiday, with families travelling home as they do at Eid al-Fitr. Sweets take second place here to meat dishes shared with guests, and, as at both Eids, the poor of the neighbourhood are remembered first.

When is Eid al-Adha?

Eid al-Adha begins on 10 Dhu al-Hijjah and lasts three to four days. Because the Islamic calendar is lunar, the date moves about eleven days earlier in each Gregorian year and can fall in any season. Its date is confirmed by the sighting of the Dhu al-Hijjah moon, and because the festival is tied to the Hajj in Mecca, Muslim communities watch for the Saudi announcement as well as their local moon.