Mubruk L3id

Mbruk L3id!
For those of you who are not up on your Muslim holidays, today marks the biggest one-day holiday of the Muslim year, 3id Kbir. Literally translated it means “big holiday.” Think Christmas big, but instead of sacrificing a tree, sacrifice a ram. That’s the idea behind it, and the killing is what makes the day what it is (at least for a non-Muslim like myself). All the visiting relatives compare the size and beauty of the carcass just like we do with Christmas trees. Maybe it was my imagination, but it really did feel like Christmas. Everyone goes to mosque in the morning. The streets were as quiet as I had ever seen them. I’m afraid the thought of stringing lights around the bleeding body even crossed my mind at one point.

A little info for the curious. 3id LKbir, or more formally 3id Ladha, is an important religious holiday celebrated by Muslims worldwide to commemorate the willingness of Abraham (Ibrahim) to sacrifice his son Ishmael (Isma’il) as an act of obedience to God, before God intervened to provide him with a ram to sacrifice instead. Two things: Yes, that was copied from Wikipedia and yes, the same story is in the Christian Bible. If I am learning one thing about religion here, it is that Christianity, Islam, and Judaism all share a lot more in common than I previously thought.

The day started with misinformation. When I showed up at my host family’s house the slaughtering had just been finished and the head was just being cut off. No worries though. The killing is symbolically important, and I wasn’t happy that I missed it, but the rest of the day was great.

I think that as soon as I stepped in to help skin the sheep, Ramdan recognized that I had very little clue what I was doing and so relegated me to the symbolic position of making sure the hanging carcass didn’t spin while they peeled the skin. By the time we were done skinning and gutting, Charifa came out with the smoking, charred, and, well, kind of gruesome looking head of the ram. Surrounding it in the bucket were its charred legs. As soon as the assorted body parts came out, the kids went to work on hacking at them with a small hatchet while Charifa sorted through the guts, squeezing the poop out and cleaning them. At one point I looked over and saw Sana gauging out the eyes with a dull knife. Undoubtedly we were going to eat those.

The first thing on the menu (the pre-lunch snack) was barbequed liver wrapped in fat. My mom will be pleased to hear that I downed that liver like a champ. It is actually pretty good. How could it not be? It’s wrapped in salty fat. After an intermission of some pomegranates and further animal parts cleaning and sorting, we had lunch. My fears of eating the head resided as the pressure cooker was brought over and a lovely smell came forth. As Charifa spooned the contents onto the plate, she said to me in darija with her usual amount of gusto, “eat. Guts.” Why thank you! That’s just what I was hoping would appear instead of the chopped up head! I admit that while the pile of assorted stomach, liver, intestine, and heart pieces didn’t look that good and the idea of it certainly was foreign to me, it did smell good. I wish I could say that it tasted as good as it smelled. It did not. But I managed a reasonable amount. Enough that there was little arguing among the family that I had eaten too little.

I guess it is a testament to how far I have come since being a vegetarian that I can say with confidence that a holiday almost entirely devoted to eating meat is a pretty good idea. Meat for lunch, meat for dinner, meat for breakfast. For four days. Bring it on!

Now, if you will please excuse me, I have to go prepare my stomach for my meat breakfast tomorrow.