Bakrid needs a makeover. India’s poor need laptops & AC, not gift of meat

Now that people don’t really look forward to a gift of meat from a wealthy neighbour, does the purported rationale of feeding the poor still validate animal sacrifice?

Beyond the semantics and phonetics, the very concept of qurbani has been crying for reforms | Representational image | Photo: Manisha Mondal, ThePrint

The Muslim festival of Baqreed is round the corner, and once again, social media is rife with arguments in opposition to, and support of, the animal sacrifice it entails. Like every year, animal rights activists are raising concerns about the cruelty and violence Baqreed brings in its wake. The Muslim retort to this objection is that a majority of Indians consume non-vegetarian food regularly, and that animals, in any case, are being slaughtered every day.

The gory spectacle

The questions about animal sacrifice are often not related to one’s dietary preference for meat. Rather, they’re about the gory spectacle of slaughter. Animals  — in many places even those whose slaughter is banned by law — are displayed in the open, paraded on roads, and butchered and disembowelled on thoroughfares. Their offal is strewn in the streets, and their blood smears the pathways. It is, to say the least, obscene, revolting, and sickening. It is also an offence — often calculated and deliberate — against the sensitivity, civility, and decency of ordinary people.

The way Baqreed is celebrated in the Indian subcontinent is vastly different from how it is done in other Muslim, mainly Arab, countries. There, it is observed more as a ritual than celebrated as a festival. It passes silently and unnoticeably, without any public display of the wealth splurged on the sacrificial animal, and without creating a civic crisis with animal refuse littered all over. They have abattoirs or designated places for the purpose, and have a system for meat distribution and waste disposal. Unlike India, they don’t slaughter animals in streets and courtyards, or on rooftops and verandahs – and they don’t leave their remains in the open for crows and stray dogs to scatter far and wide.

So, why couldn’t Indian Muslims create such a system? Those who spend lakhs of rupees on animals of sacrifice could easily create such facilities too. Perhaps Baqreed in India has been meant to be celebrated in a demonstrative way. Historically, its semiotics of power and domination were important cultural weapons for intimidating the Hindu populace and strengthening Muslim rule. Since the beginning of Muslim rule in India, Baqreed has been a political, or power, festival denoting the readiness for violence.

Even now, people can be heard talking about the number of qurbani (sacrifices) in different areas to assess the standing that Muslims have in those places. How intricately the motifs of violence and domination are imbricated in the performance of animal sacrifice could be surmised from a small autobiographical aside. As a child, this writer would be exhorted to watch the rite of sacrifice so that his heart could become strong (dil mazboot hoga). I guess it was a euphemism for inoculation against violence.

The original cow politics

How politically fraught Baqreed has been is clear from its nomenclature. Its real name is Eid-ul Ad’ha (as per Arabic phonetics), or Eid-ul Az’ha (as per Indian phonetics). Baqreed is a uniquely Indian name (The ‘q’ in it is used to represent the epiglottal ‘k’ of Arabic). Baqr in Arabic means cow. The second, and the longest, surah in the Quran is named Al-Baqara, or The Cow. Thus, Baqreed means the Eid of Cow, a festival in which the cow is sacrificed.

So, how did this festival come to be known as Baqreed in the Indian subcontinent?

During Muslim rule, besides the demolition of temples, cow slaughter was institutionalised as a means to keep Hindus perpetually demoralised. Those who were converted to Islam had to undergo the rite of passage through repeated and regular ingestion of beef. It was the litmus test of their conversion. In fact, for converts, there wasn’t much to being a Muslim other than eating beef. Once they consumed this meat, they broke the biggest taboo, lost their caste, and burnt their bridges with the society to which they belonged. They were stranded forever and could never return home. That’s why an addiction to beef was promoted among the converts.

And what better way to develop the cult of beef than tweaking a festival of sacrifice into the mass slaughter of cows while naming it after the hapless bovine. Nowhere in the world do Muslims have such a fascination for beef as in India, and nowhere in the world is cow slaughter part of the performative religiosity of Islam. The irony is even starker. Not only does the cow have no significance in Islam, and its sacrifice has no merit whatsoever, but the animal sacrifice during Eid-ul Az’ha itself is not mandatory or farz for the Muslim. Most schools of Islamic jurisprudence regard it as sunnat – a non-binding practice of Prophet Muhammad – under the supererogatory nafl category, which makes it a voluntary act. Even the Hanafi school treats it as only obligatory (wajib), a degree below farz. Animal sacrifice has been a rite of the Haj pilgrimage, but it becomes mandatory only if one undertakes Umra (lesser pilgrimage) in addition to the main Haj.

Reformulation of sacrifice 

It was politics, essentially, that made qurbani effectively a farz for every financially competent (sahib-e nisab) person. Now that the days of such politics are over, Islam, too, needs to depoliticise and reformulate itself as per the ethical requirements of this age.

One of the first changes should be to either fully discard the word Baqreed or modify its spelling in Urdu to phonetically resemble the already existing Bakrid. It can be achieved by substituting the ‘q’ in it – which represents the epiglottal sound of badi qaaf – with ‘k’, which represents the softer chhoti kaaf. This change would alter the meaning, making it ‘the festival of goat’, as is commonly believed due to the similarity between words used for cow and goat.

Reinterpretation of sacrifice

Beyond the semantics and phonetics, the very concept of qurbani has been crying for reforms. According to the Islamic tradition, Eid-ul Az’ha is the remembrance of the Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham)’s willingness to sacrifice his son in obedience to God’s command. Pleased with his wholehearted submission to the divine will, God spared him filicide and substituted his son with a sheep at the altar. This story is a parable for the evolution of religion as it transitioned from human to animal sacrifice.

Conceptually, sacrifice wasn’t about killing. It was about offering to God what one held most precious — one’s life, one’s son’s life, or one’s property. In pastoral and agricultural societies, animals were the primary form of property. In different languages, the words used for them had an economic connotation. The word cattle means property, and livestock conveys the same sense. Farmers in North India have long used the word maal (property) for cattle.

The pristine ethos of sacrifice is neither about killing nor about the destruction of property. Rather, it’s about serving God by sharing one’s bounties with fellow beings. Sharing food has been the elementary way of charity in societies haunted by scarcity. Sharing meat was a premium form of charity, which validated animal sacrifices.

But now that not many go to sleep on an empty stomach, and people don’t really look forward to a gift of meat from a wealthy neighbour, does the purported rationale of feeding the poor still validate such actions?

Now that cattle is no longer the primary form of wealth, can the ritual slaughter of animals still qualify as sacrifice – especially if the concept behind the ritual is about setting aside a portion of one’s wealth for the poor? Does it still bring one closer to God, as is implied by ‘qurbani’? The word is derived from the Arabic triliteral q-r-b, which means nearness.

Poverty is a relative term. In present times, it doesn’t mean hunger. Underprivileged people today might be more in need of a laptop for their daughter’s education, or of some money to make their son’s startup dream a reality. They might even need an air conditioner to sleep well in the scorching summer. Such individuals don’t wait for a handful of mutton from a neighbour’s house. The metrics of poverty have changed. The idea of charity, therefore, should also change – along with notions of what one should sacrifice to alleviate the difficulties of those less fortunate.

Compassion, ethics of sacrifice

There is an ethical and philosophical question involved: Could life be sacrificed in the name of God? Some religions, such as Jainism, hold all life sacred. Even in Islam, killing an animal for food is no ordinary matter. It requires a special dispensation from God, who is the most merciful and the most compassionate. That is why animals are ritually slaughtered only after invoking Allah’s name – it makes halal (permissible) what is otherwise haram (forbidden).

The philosopher Karl Jaspers pointed out how compassion became a central tenet of religious ethics between the 8th and 3rd century BCE. In this period, new ways of thinking appeared around the world, which changed religion and philosophy forever.

Jaspers named this period the Achsenzeit or Axial Age.

In India, this was the time when the Vedic sacrificial cult came under attack from the heterodox philosophies of Shramanic traditions such as Jainism and Buddhism. They popularised a new culture of peace, non-violence, and compassion. The Vedic tradition was able to make a comeback only after it renounced the sacrificial cult, embraced ahimsa, and adopted vegetarianism.

We are living in another transformative age. The ideas of vegetarianism, even veganism, have gained ground. The Muslims have generally ignored these trends. But if Islam has to remain relevant, it will have to take cognisance of contemporary developments. In an age that is sensitive to violence against animals, sacrifices appear primitive and anachronistic.

In history, religions evolved from human to cattle sacrifice. Should they not evolve further into another form of sacrifice? The continuance of the cult of sacrifice to this age is a sign of primitivism. It’s said in the Quran, “It is not the sacrificed animal’s meat nor their blood that reaches God; it is your piety that reaches Him.” (22:37)

Islam needs to discard the cult of sacrifice if it wishes to arrest its descent into a cult of violence.

Ibn Khaldun Bharati is a student of Islam, and looks at Islamic history from an Indian perspective. He tweets @IbnKhaldunIndic. Views are personal.

Editor’s note: We know the writer well and only allow pseudonyms when we do so.

(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)