During the height of the Winter ‘Eid, the roads in Downtown run with blood and piss. It is at this time that the mass slaughter of the herds of sheep and cows that have been huddled outside butchers and roaming the streets over the past week or so takes place. There are mounds of crap, and also guts and feet. Once on the way to my friends flat I was lucky enough to find a horn; I wanted to keep it but then I realised this was a bit disgusting. Walking around even wealthy and relatively westernised areas such as Mohandiseen where I lived, you have to watch where you tread in case you accidentally step on something’s colon or stomach. It was around this time that my flatmate James saw a man pushing a wheelbarrow piled high with shit down our street, singing. He came home fuming, demanding to know “Where has he got the shit from? where is he taking it? And why is he singing to it?!” I told him I didn’t know, but suggested that he might be related to the cake selling midget who had chased him down Sharia’ Shehab the week before.
These gruesome – and massively unhygienic - sights therefore jar somewhat with the festival atmosphere that infects central Cairo and its inhabitants during these few days at the end of the year. This is the ‘Eid al-AdHaa, The Festival of the Sacrifice (in Egypt ‘Eid al-Kabir), The Big ‘Eid, which starts for three days the 10th day of the 12th month of the Islamic Calendar, the month in which the Hajj takes place. This is around the 17th of December, and commemorates the actions of Abraham who was ready to sacrifice his own son, Ishmael, as God had commanded. After Abraham had thus demonstrated his devotion to the Lord over all things, God took mercy on him and allowed him to sacrifice a sheep in place of his first born. It is for this reason that the best animals are selected and herded up in back alleys and main roads alike in preparation for the ‘Eid. In one particular street, the animals had been gathered under a large fairy light lit pavilion, built like the entrance to a fairground over the front of the regular butcher’s shop, where their throats were slit and their blood drained before they were skinned, gutted and turned into the meat for the many large and communal feasts that would take place over the next few days. The whole process took place in the street, late at night, in front of the crowd that had gathered there excitedly, and watched as an employee of the butcher’s shop recited the traditional prayers into a microphone at the top of his voice, at times reaching a sort of euphoric wail that seemed to spring from his very gut. Children ran and played around the animals and their various deposits; screaming and singing and swarming around my brother - blue eyed and friendly faced as he is.
Second only to the atmosphere of festivity that buzzes in the air during the ‘Eids is the sense of community. As in Ramadan, where food is often taken en masse and outside in large communal areas; the meat from this festival is not simply eaten, it is feasted upon, shared amongst families and friends and even strangers who happen to be walking past. As is decreed in the Qu’ran, meat is also provided for those who cannot afford their own, and wealthy Muslims with their own livestock are expected to contribute their best animals to be slaughtered to look after the poor and hungry, which in Egypt is a lot of people.
This is why even as you watch the blade being drawn across the throat, the blood spilling and the legs twitching, the skin being tugged from the flesh and finally the flat slab of meat being slapped onto the board; it is hard not to be fascinated, even enthralled by the whole gruesome process, just as the people are who come to watch it happening. It is probably something quite primitive, and what you are watching is – at is most basic level - ritual sacrifice. But even so, it’s pretty fuckin gnarly.
words: Adam Thomas
1 comment:
That is sick!! Why do humans feel that they have the right to make an animal suffer!
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