Eid Mubarak

Eid dinner at a friend's house in Tirur. We were served fried chicken, biryani, and payaasaim, which is sweet drink made of sugar, milk, and crushed cashews.

***
“After prayers, then we will go see the slaughter,” Shareef said. “You do want to see the slaughter, right?”

I nodded my head. Of course. It did not seem like an opportunity one passed up too readily.

We were standing on a muddy soccer field on the south side of Tirur on the morning of the Muslim celebration of Eid-al-Adha. Hundreds of Muslims from the area had convened for a special public prayer session. Tarps were laid out in a large square for the devoted to kneel on while keeping their white dishdashas immaculate. A burgundy colored cloth sheet propped up by bamboo poles demarcated the men’s praying area from the women’s.

Shareef—our Tirur-based boss from the American TESOL Institute—had invited us the previous night to come watch the morning prayers and then accompany him to a nearby field where men would ritually slaughter two dozen head of cattle. The offer left a decidedly Biblical impression, which turned out to be right in keeping with the spirit of Eid-al-Adha.

For Muslims, the holiday commemorates the ancient event when Allah asked Ibrahim to sacrifice Ishmael, found in the Qu’ran’s second chapter (or surya). For Christians and Jews, this story appears in the Old Testament and Torah as Abraham stepping forward to heed God’s order to sacrifice Isaac. At the last moment, as Abraham is about to kill his son, God intervenes and praises Abraham’s devotion, then asks him to sacrifice a goat instead.

In recognition of the ancient story, Muslims repeat the ritualized sacrifice of animals on this day. Around Tirur hundreds of cows would be publicly slaughtered in open fields and in the yards of private homes. The meat, then, would be given to family members and friends and donated to the poor.

“The story (of Abraham) is common for us,” Shareef said as we entered the field from a makeshift parking lot at the back. He grasped his young son’s hand as he walked. With us were Ashraf and Shakeela, married friends of Shareef’s. “Ibrahim showed a great will,” Shareef continued, daintily stepping over patches of runny mud. “Impossible to imagine that devotion. But we celebrate his dedication to God and God’s mercy on this day.”

Shakeela took Jenna to the women’s side and Shareef proceeded to introduce me to a string of friends and acquaintances milling about in the growing crowd of worshippers. He seemed to recognize everyone at the event. “Salaam alaikum. Eid Mubarak! Eid Mubarak! Eid Greetings!”

As I began to look around, I spotted several of my students from JM Higher Secondary School. They saw me and waved back excitedly, some walking purposefully up to me and shaking my hand: “Hello, sir, how are you? Eid Mubarak, sir!”

The field was filling up quickly. More tarps and straw mats were brought in to extend the prayer area back towards the parking lot. Dozens of men milled about as they waited for space to be made. All the while, a calming chant of four harmonized voices lifted over the crowd, projected by loudspeakers: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!”

The older men at the gathering wore more traditional clothes—flowing white dishdashas and knitted skullcaps, dhotis and collared shirts. The younger men and the boys wore modern dress: tight jeans, brightly patterned button-up shirts, sneakers, their hair gelled and coiffed to perfection. Across the way, I could see the colorful, abstracted milieu of the women’s section—saris, cloth abayas and silky dupattas of every color, creating a variegated tapestry of bobbing heads and waving arms.

A signal was given, and soon all the participants had placed themselves seated on a mat or tarp. The imam (or prayer leader) stood up and faced west towards Mecca. He began: “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” He sung the lines in a lilting melody, not unlike a Gregorian chant. The audience repeated the prayer in unison. The crowd did a series of bows and full prostrations on their knees, arms extended out over their heads stretching towards the horizon. Brief interludes of silence punctuated the prayer, filling the field with a reflective calm that is only attainable in moments of worship.

After the prayer, the audience settled into a sitting position and the imam began his sermon, speaking in Malayalam. I noticed younger members of the crowd get up and move towards the back, where they congregated in hushed groups, talking and laughing quietly. As the sermon ground on, more people rose and moved back, greeting each other and roving about the field looking for friends. Small children chased each other and young boys (several of whom I recognized as my students) wandered around aimlessly, glancing surreptitiously over at the women’s section every now and then.

Two things struck me about this event. First, the friendliness of the crowd. I was greeted and salaamed repeatedly throughout the morning. Men I did not know came up to me and shook my hand, asked me where I was from, snapped a photo of me with their cell phones. I quickly learned that “Eid Mubarak” basically means “Happy Eid”, and I began saying it back to those who greeted me with it.

Secondly, any images I had of a monolithic Islamic religion were cleanly removed from my mind. At this one small ceremony in Tirur, I noticed a spectrum of devotion. I saw worshipers who were prayerfully fixated on every move and nuance of the service and hung on every word of the imam during his sermon. I noticed families who skipped in to the service late, with harried looks on their faces (the Muslim version of families who go to church only on Christmas and Easter). I observed worshipers leave the second the opening prayer ended, getting in their cars and on their motorbikes to beat traffic. It was obvious that a wide cross-section of belief was present. Essentially, the same range of religiosity you would find at any church in America.

Shareef and his friends were the types of worshipers who stayed until the very end of the sermon. As the imam closed, and the crowd dispersed, Shareef, Ashraf, Shakeela Jenna and I all congregated back at Ashraf’s car.

“Now, let us see the slaughter,” Shareef said, clapping my back.

***

The men had gathered in a small field, surrounded on three sides by low-slung apartments. On the fourth side lay a small winding road that—a few hundreds yards up—ran past JM Higher Secondary School. On most days, the field is an unremarkable patch of tall grass and bent trees. On Eid-al-Adha, though, it had quite literally turned into a killing field.

Ashraf drove up and let us out and said he would park the car further down the road. Cars, motor bikes and scooters clogged the narrow lane and men stood hesitantly on the edge of the field on the road’s curb, looking out towards the field where more men were huddled around an inert form on the ground. A line of Brahmin cows stood laconically tied to a rope tether by a small tent held up by bamboo poles. A few men under the tent were ecstatically waving their hands, asking us to come into the field.

“There are no women here,” Jenna said, pausing at the grass’s edge. The smell of cow manure permeated the air.

“Come on,” I said. “Just watch out for the cow patties.”

We wound our way through the maze of dung and weeds and finally reached the tent, where the men who had been waving shook our hands vigorously. Then, one man—who had a spot of blood on his white T-shirt—pointed further into the field, where the crowd of men we had seen from the road was standing in a loose circle.

From our new vantage, we could see what the inert form had been: a slaughtered cow, it’s neck severed nearly all the way through, a red coiling mass of muscles and tendons bulging out of the gaping wound. This cow, which lay dead at the center of the circle of gawping men was only the latest sacrifice. A dozen other cow carcasses lay around the field, all with the same slash at the neck, the boils of blood spilling onto the green-brown grass around their heads.

Jenna and I both reserved judgment. No thoughts of humanitarian angst or meat-eaters’ guilt ran through our heads. After all, we love a good steak. And we have talked longingly of hamburgers ever since we got to India. Here, we were presented with about 20 fresh tons of T-bones and Big Macs. We couldn’t complain.

But the plain fact of the matter is: neither one of us had ever seen an animal slaughtered. We had never witnessed the last moments of life and had never watched an animal struggle for its very existence before succumbing to death. In this manner, the scene before was rather discomfiting.

The men given the task of sacrificing took the cows one by one from the tether. They led the next beast to an open spot in the field. The crowd of watchers gingerly followed, small boys and teenagers pushing to get the best view. Three men pushed the cow to the ground so it was lying on its side. Two men tied its legs together. Another man twisted the cow’s head so that the soft underside of its neck was exposed . The whole while the beast struggled, baying and groaning against the combined efforts of the sacrificial team. At last, the man with the knife came in, bent down, and with a vigorous sawing motion cut into the cow’s neck. As the cut was made and blood spurted from the wound, the men in the circle whispered, “Allahu Akbar.” The neck made an astonishing hissing sound as the blood was released. The nearly severed head jerked and twisted and the cow’s tongue reflexively lolled out of its mouth.

I had read stories of the French Revolution, when traitors to the state were beheaded, how their bodies continued to twitch after the guillotine’s blade had come down. I had always remembered that detail both because it was patently gruesome and anatomically fascinating. Now, in the wake of the cow being slaughtered, I watched as its whole bulky frame twitched and shuttered, its legs kicked out spasmodically and the muscles in its face unbelievably continued to flicker with life. The cow, whose throat had been cut, still convulsed out a moo before choking on blood.

I describe all this not to be prurient or sensational. The whole ritual was played off within a context of respect and duty. I learned from an elderly man surveying the sacrifices that the cows had been purchased by teams of buyers, of which each member donated Rs. 2,500. “For each share, the person can take home part of the cow. Many donate the meat to the poor,” he said. “It is God’s will.”

In this world of industrial meat-packing plants and giant corporate cattle farms, what we were witnessing on this field in Tirur must actually be a rather dignified way for cows to go—prayed over as they die, stripped of their meat by hand knives, their meat parceled out in a spirit of charity and communalism. It all struck me as very ancient. I imagined similar rituals happening centuries even millennia ago.

Shareef had come and he was still walking with his young son. “You like?” he asked with a big grin. “It is wonderful, nahn? So much meat. You want some?”

I demurred, but Shareef would have not of it. “Of course, you should have some.” He gestured to new teams of men, who had begun skinning the carcasses and flaying off gigantic shanks of fresh meat that still seemed to pulse with life. One grunted under the strain of an entire leg as he carried it back to the tent.

“You will have beef tonight!” Shareef said proudly. There was certainly plenty to go around, I thought, as I looked over the field of sacrifices.