Abraham's Dream

Well, in the beginning, there was Abraham. The biblical story of his sacrificial child is the genesis of what is called "Kurban Bayramı" in Turkish and "Eid ul-Adha" in Arabic. The Pentateuch, a.k.a. the Jewish Bible, teaches that one day Abraham saw a revelational dream in which he was to sacrifice his beloved little son, Isaac, to God. Abraham, the loyal servant of his Lord, decided to obey this harsh commandment, despite his immense agony. But lo! This was only a test for his faith. At the last moment, when he rested the unfortunate Isaac down with knife in hand, one of God's angels called on him to stop and brought a miraculous lamb that he could sacrifice to God.

However shocking to most moderns this story might be, it is deeply meaningful to a traditional theist who believes that God has absolute sovereignty over His creation and that obedience to His commandments will — despite apparent troubles — bring ultimate peace and salvation, since He is all-merciful and all-caring. Abraham believed in this divine promise and hence was blessed to be "a father of many nations," which includes all Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Islamic Abrahamism

Interestingly enough, it is the Muslims who keep up with Abraham's tradition in the most literal sense. Sacrificial ceremonies were an integral part of Judaism until the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem by the pagan Romans in A.D. 70, but from then on, they ceased to exist. Paulian Christianity had already abandoned much of Jewish law, including sacrifices. But Islam stuck to the tradition, along with other established Jewish practices such as circumcision.

Alas, Abraham is remarkably central to the Muslim faith in all aspects. He is regarded very highly in the Koran, and the five-times-a-day Muslim payer ("salat" in Arabic and "namaz" in Turkish) includes a part in which "Abraham and his descendents" — which includes the Jews, of course — are praised. The Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims are required to do at least once in their lives if they can afford to, is also focused on Abraham. The Ka'aba, the cube-shaped building at the center of Mecca to which the Hajj and all Muslim prayers are directed, is described in the Koran as "the first temple built on Earth to worship God" by Abraham and his son Ishmael.

Who Was The Sacrificial Child?

Muslims have given great importance to the story of the sacrifice of Abraham's son, which the whole of Kurban Bayramı is built around. But there is an interesting difference in the Islamic version of the sacrifice account: This time the child is Ishmael, not Isaac.

Why the difference? The most plausible answer is that while Isaac is regarded as the father of the Jews, Ishmael is taken as the father of the Arabs. Thus, the latter fits more nicely into the Islamic scheme of things.

However, the replacing of Isaac with Ishmael was not a Koranic move. Muslim scripture never mentions the name of the sacrificial child. Moreover, as American Muslim scholar Shaykh Hamza Yusuf notes, "Many of the early scholars said it was Isaac." Nevertheless, Yusuf adds, "A majority of the later scholars say it was Ishmael."

The Controversy

That's all theology... Now let's come back to Turkey and this Sunday's "Kurban Bayramı." The ritual is actually not only theological but also very social: Every Muslim adult with a certain level of wealth is obliged to offer a sacrifice. One-third of the meat is to be consumed at home, and is done so in a spirit similar to that of Thanksgiving. The rest of the meat has to be distributed to neighbors and especially the poor. For many needy families, Kurban Bayramı is the only time of the year that they have abundant protein on their table.

However, this charitable tradition has become a bone of contention in Turkey in recent years for both aesthetic reasons and, to a lesser degree, animal rights concerns. The media has been continuously criticizing the “bloody scenes” of slaughter in big cities, which are regarded as an embarrassment for modern Turkey. For most "White Turks," a witty term referring to the country's Westernized elite, the rites of Kurban Bayramı are simply backward and repulsive. For them, it is only a holiday, a chance to fly to European capitals and come back with duty-free champagne. The Islamic media, in response, criticize the de-Islamization of the bayrams. (The other bayram is also controversial. Some call it after Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, while others prefer a secular term and call it "Şeker Bayramı," i.e., the Feast of Sweets.)

Some commentators see a sort of urban-rural dichotomy behind all this debate. In the old, neat and stratified Turkey, the secular city elite was living in its oasis of a self-styled modernity, and religion could only preserve itself in the countryside. Since the 1950s, and more so since the '80s, though, a massive migration from villages and little towns to metropolises like Istanbul has taken full swing. Ex-villagers (say, "Black Turks") who used to celebrate their Kurban Bayramı and offer their sacrifices around wheat fields are now doing the same thing near highways and streets.

Reformist Views

Some reformist Muslim scholars have come up with an unexpected solution to the controversy. They question whether it is really an Islamic duty to sacrifice animals annually. The idea of sacrifice is certainly in the Koran, but there is no "Bayram" for it. The only clear commandment in Muslim scripture is about the sacrifice by the pilgrims during their visit to the Ka'aba. It was actually a later development to establish a feast at the time of the Hajj in which not only the pilgrims but all Muslims around the world are required to offer sacrifices.

With similar arguments, Dr. Hüseyin Hatemi, a professor of law at Istanbul University and a prominent public Muslim intellectual, has been a strong critic of what he calls "the feast of the stew." The essence of the Islamic idea of sacrifice was to help the hungry with abundant food, Hatemi argues, and today there might be other ways to do it. Hatemi is also known for his concern for animals. Catching fish with hooks is un-Islamic, he argues, because it inflicts too much pain on the creatures.

Other reformist scholars such as Dr. Süleyman Ateş and Dr. Zekeriya Beyaz also object to the tradition of annual sacrifice. "Instead of paying for the slaughtering of sheep," Dr. Beyza Bilgin, another progressive theologian, says, "Muslims can use their money to give alms to the poor." Last year a top official of the Religious Affairs Directorate, Professor Mehmet Görmez, also pointed out that sacrifice is not "farz," i.e., a strict religious duty in Islam, and the earliest caliphs did not practice it since they worried people would consider it to be farz. Görmez also added that Turks' enthusiasm for the sacrifice is not so widely shared in Arab countries like Jordan and Egypt.

The debate continues. And so do the "bloody scenes" around the streets of Turkey, along with the aversion of the White Turks. Perhaps some Grey Turks will bring a solution at some point, by which the Turkish children of Abraham will find their way to be loyal to their faith and tuned to modern life.