Eid Al-Adha

The world is quiet. The world is peaceful. And yet today, the streets run with blood.

I know I said I wasn’t going to blog this year, and I probably shouldn’t for the sake of my Arabic, but at the same time try as I might I’m not speaking with loved ones often enough to keep them up to date on anything. As such, this blog shall serve as a compromise. I don’t plan to write often, I don’t plan to write a lot, but when I have something interesting to report on it will go here. On slow days, or days I want to procrastinate, you may even get a back story or two. We’ll see.

Now, back to that opening. Today is Eid al-Adha, or the big eid as compared to Ramadan’s small eid, Eid al-Fitr. (Eid translates as holiday in Arabic.) It occurs yearly in the Islamic calendar and coincides with the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca that all able bodied Muslims are required to complete at least once. As the term big eid might suggest, it's not taken lightly and people have spent weeks preparing in addition to the week we now have off of school. It was not an event I was willing to miss.

The adhan (call to prayer) went off this morning bright and early as usual, rousing me at 4:30 AM from the hour or so of sleep I'd gotten. I'm usually able to sleep trough the adhan, or at least roll over and go back to sleep, but this morning I was excited and so I rolled out of bed and began preparing for my day. A little after 5:00 AM, the second call went off - but this one was insistent. The carefully measured tones of the muezins filtered through my bedroom window for more than an hour while I began to make the morning's round of phone calls.

While I have a beautiful view from my balcony, everything I can see is private space while Eid is very public. As such, I'd made plans last night to go to a friend's apartment this morning to watch the festivities. She lives next to a mosque and on a main street, which is the perfect recipe for celebration.

When I called at 6:15 my friend assured me no one had arrived yet, but in the five minutes it took me to walk over there the entirety of Alexandria had descended upon the streets. Prayer mats had been laid out last night, covering everything but the sidewalks, lights and balloons had been draped between buildings and a stage bearing the seal of the Muslim Brotherhood had been erected in the intersection at the head of the street. People were everywhere, and for the first time I saw women and children alongside the men. Representatives from the Brotherhood were giving out goody bags filled with stickers and balloons, and the adhan continued to reverberate off the buildings. Despite the crowd, I managed to make it up to my friends apartment without drawing too much attention, and we were able to watch the proceedings from her balcony.



After the prayer and the short sermon afterward came the real spectacle, and it only took us a few minutes of watching from above before we decided we needed a closer look. Apart from the prayer, the most important part of Eid al-Adha is the animal sacrifice. As a way of thanking God for his blessings and performing an act of charity at the same time, every financially capable family is obliged to purchase and ritually slaughter an animal, the extra meat from which will be donated to the poor. Goats will cover an average size family, but larger or more well to do families and multiple families wanting to go in on an animal together sometimes buy cows. Immediately following the clearing of the prayer mats, these animals are slaughtered publicly and en masse. It's a literal assembly line of killing, gutting, skinning, and hanging - and in accordance with the hadith (sayings of the prophet Muhammad) it is best for the believers to watch the slaughter. As a result, crowds of solemn worshipers gather around the butcher shops to see these animals put to death. I've heard some of the more vocal Christians complain that there will be blood in the streets for weeks. The experience is surreal.



The world is quiet. The world is peaceful. And yet today, the streets run with blood.

I didn't stay out long before returning to write this post for you. There are obviously more details, but after last night's lack of sleep I have neither the desire nor the presence of mind to give them to you. Since I'm not giving a blow by blow account of my daily activities, I have opened up the comments section if you have any questions about this post in particular or life in Egypt in general. No topic is off limits and it will let me know what you guys are interested in hearing about. I hope to hear from you.

That's all for now. Kul sinna wa intou tayyebin!