Eidul Azha celebrates the spirit of sacrifice, but what we celebrate is the eating of meat, which is done with elaborate display and relish of our social position, as measured in the price and pompous size of the animal that is paraded in public before its ritual slaughter. Sacrifice turns into vanity just as Ramazan fasting transforms into feasting. With the rising cost of eligible animals from Eid to Eid, the ritual is becoming a luxury of the rich with fewer people earning God’s pleasure every coming year. On this Eid particularly, the price of animals has simply doubled over last year’s as the number of livestock killed in the October 8 earthquake is probably larger than the human toll that we can see in the small flocks available for sale in Islamabad.

The practice of paying cash to welfare organizations like Edhi and Imran Khan’s outfit in the name of collective sacrifice has been gaining popularity among the religiously liberal and economically less affluent people despite the strong opposition by the orthodox forces who would rather see meat rot than its cost in money go towards the help of the needy. But realizing the great shortage of sacrificial hides that is foreseen this year one leading religious party which used to claim the largest collection has dropped its earlier opposition to this scheme and has announced its own scheme for collecting money for collective sacrifice. This is the kind of hypocrisy we need, to popularize concepts which are socially more useful than individual acts of goodness.

The ritual of sacrificing animals has become quite devoid of its social purpose as with the availability of freezers and deep freezers in every meat eating household the custom of distributing sacrificial portions has almost become extinct. Now whole carcasses are laid to rest in huge cooling storages to ensure guaranteed supply for months. So even ritually speaking, the element of sacrifice in slaughtering a goat is gone. Now what is happening in reality is that we are purchasing meat for our own personal consumption in the name of performing a religious duty.

In the wake of the earthquake it would have been proper and more ‘sawab-fetching’ if the money spent on costly sacrificial animals had been donated towards meeting the urgent needs of the victims. The government itself like Edhi and other welfare bodies could have asked people to channel the sacrifice money into something more purposeful and lasting for the help of the earthquake victims. But that would have required courage and common sense which we have in such short supply when it comes to doing good for the poor.