Eid al Adha

We just celebrated another Eid holiday here last week - we have had several since we arrived - one of the reasons we love being here - they love their religion and we love their holidays. They take it seriously usually closing the country down for several days. Eid Al Adha starts after the Haj pilgramage and approximately 70 days after Ramadan (so the dates are never known at the start of the year - again making it difficult for planning.) This is the festival of sacrifice to commemorate the willingness of Abraham to demonstrate his faith in God and sacrifice his son Ishmael. In historical accounts such as the Bible it is the first born son Isaac. So, a goat or other animal sacrifice is an important part of this festival - it is commmon to see animals on the back of trucks the few days around this Eid. One small drawback to this festival was that they seemed to put up the loudspeaker on all the mosques and preached throughtout the night. One early morning after listening to a preacher on loudspeaker for what seemed like hours I finally decided to get up and go and have a peek at our local mosque - from the tinted windows of our car. I drove to our local mosque - only a few hundred metres to find it empty, then the next local mosque which was again empty. Curious, I continued down the road to find hundreds of cars and thousands of men praying in an open desert paddock where they had just witnessed the sacrifice of an animal - part of the tradition requires that each man sacrifice his own animal with his own hands and if he can't do it he can ask someone else to do it for him, but he must witness it. Unfortunately, I was not brave enough in my brief nightdress to draw too much attention to myself by taking photos, so this is all I could manage.