This year, Eid Al-Kabir took place in early December, and so this entry is both cursed and blessed with the gift of time to reflect and ruminate on my experience. While I doubt I can add anything that hasn't been said before, I wanted to share this unique experience with my family and friends that read this blog.
So, the facts. Moroccans celebrate Eid Al-Kabir with the sacrifice of a sheep (qibsh), which is followed by eating nearly all of the animal.
In the weeks leading up to the Eid, subtle changes occur in the medina. Knives, barbeque sets, salt, and cumin, the accoutrements of Eid, are on display on every street corner. Moroccans drag reluctant sheep through the streets to their homes, where the sheep will live until they meet their maker. The sheep often live on the roofs, and so the bleats of sheep that seem to know what awaits them adds to the usual cacophony of roosters and stray cats in heat that make up our daily medina soundtrack.
Here is a photo of my friend Susannah's sheep, who we nicknamed Senoir Qibsh.
Our landlord Mustafa and his mother Fatima invited my roommate Roz and I to their home for the holiday. Not wanting to 1) Offend our wonderful landlords by refusing their invitation, and 2) Miss out on this singular experience, we accepted. We'll only stay for the sacrifice, we told each other. Whatever happens, we will not eat innards.
When we arrived to our landlord's apartment, the sheep was already up on the roof. The families in the building must have staggered themselves, because our group was the only one there. Our small group was composed of Roz, Mustafa, Fatima, a family friend, a butcher, and me. (Similar to Jewish dietary law, the sheep must be butchered in a specific way, and trained butchers are in hot demand during the Eid.)
The butcher and the friend held down the sheep, said B'ismilah (in the name of Allah) and slit it's throat. After the sheep stopped convulsing, the family decapitated the animal, drained the blood into the roof’s drain, and skinned it, the last of which involved poking a hole in the skin and blowing into the hole, effectively loosening the skin from the body. Then they went to work on the innards, cutting everything out and placing them in a large bowl.
Afterwards, we made our way downstairs, where Roz and I drank tea and watched Men in Black while Fatima prepared lunch. This is when Roz and I started to panic and doubt our resolution to avoid eating innards. We knew that brains take a day to prepare, and so they wouldn’t be on the menu. But what other organs would be presented to us? As we watched Fatima bring bread, cumin, salt, and soda out to the table one by one, I felt like we were in some insane parody of “The Tell Tale Heart,” in which every passing minute compounded our fear. It didn’t help that the decapitated carcass sat just feet from us on a spare table, slowly dripping its remaining blood into bucket.
Finally, lunch was served. Roz and I eyed the meat kabobs (neither of us had any idea what type of meat it was), made eye contact, silently weighed our options, and dug in.
The meat was chewy. And smoky. And wrapped in fat. I tried to keep my bread-to-meat ratio high, and followed every bite with a large gulp of soda. Fatima’s eyes were on us as we made our way through the kabobs, and so I tried my best to fight my gag reflex, keep a smile on my face, and not think about what I was eating. Roz did the same.
When we left, we thanked Fatima and Mustafa profusely. And, despite the greasy, charred taste that wouldn’t leave our mouths, we meant it. They opened their home up to us, not because they had to, but because they wanted to share the holiday with us. And I’m truly grateful for their hospitality.
Roz has a motorcycle, and, as we made our way back to our house, the streets were smoky with makeshift barbeque pits, where young men cooked sheep's heads. As we entered the gate of the medina, the streets literally ran red with blood. The slight rain only added to how surreal the experience was; it looked like the apocalypse.
I left the day with a mixed perception of the Eid. In many ways, the holiday has become less about the sacrifice's religious origins and more about the expensive rituals (and associated status). A nice sheep will set a family back more than 100 dollars, and families that can't afford a sheep sacrifice a smaller animal, like a goat or a chicken. Shortly before the Eid, a girl in the hammam asked me for money so that her family could buy an animal. This is not uncommon. And it seems to me that such a spiritual event taking on such a capitalistic dimension is the antithesis of the holiday.
And yet it is difficult to deny the impact of an entire nation (not just Morocco, but the larger Islamic ummah) celebrating the holiday together. It's about more than eating a sheep's brains; it's about faith. Not just individual faith, but collective faith. It's something Americans, raised in a nation of "secularism" and religious plurality, may have a difficult time fathoming. Even though I am not Muslim, there's immense power in the though that the King of Morocco and families in the slums of Fes, and everyone in between, celebrate a moment of faith, of belief, together.
And so the contradictions, and the beauty that lies within them, continue.
PS- I finally found out what sort of meat I consumed several weeks later, when my Arabic teacher asked us about our Eid experiences. "What did you eat?," she asked me. "Bouchra, I don't know." "You don't understand the question?" "No, I have idea what I ate."
After much discussion, she decided that I ate the sheep's pancreas. Bi Sahah. And B'Salaamah, Mr. Qibsh.
