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THE other day the delivery boy asked me to share some of the meat from my sacrificial animal with him. Every day I see my neighbours walking their goats around evening time, and in every house there are half a dozen animals stocked up.
“Look at theirs, it’s so skinny,” one fellow walking a fat healthy goat said, pointing towards an admittedly scrawny animal that was ushered out of the pedestrian gate of a neighbour’s house. “Won’t give you any meat worth the name.”
Then the fellow from across the street opened his gate, and out walked six proud animals, fattened up good for the slaughter, and behind them two sheep, also fat and juicy and covered in the fluffiest of fur.
“Wow! Look at those animals,” someone shouted, already walking a couple of doomed cattle on the street. “Their meat will feed an entire neighbourhood, and that fur will be worth a fortune!”
Consumerism has its peculiar demands. They include fetishising the object of consumption — the commodity.
There’s something bizarre about watching people drool over other people’s animals. Until you realise that this sacrificial ritual, seen as a symbolic tribute to the intense devotion to God’s command that the Prophet Ibrahim displayed, has been absorbed into a modern culture of consumerism.
Consumerism has its peculiar demands. They include fetishising the object of consumption — the commodity. They include ascribing the commodity with qualities it does not intrinsically possess, like how a goat can become a symbol of status at a particular time of the year. None of my neighbours are otherwise the goat-herding types, and it is very likely they would look down on anyone who reared his own animals at home to harvest for meat, milk and eggs. But on Eid day, we’re all goat-herders, and the bigger and fatter our goat, the springier our stride.
Fetishising the commodity also involves endowing it with sensual qualities. This is why pretty girls are used as models in ads selling everything from soap and detergent to mobile phone packages. The ads evoke an instinctual response in the consumer, calling out the reflex to be drawn to pretty girls, either as objects of desire or objects of jealousy. They seek to harness that reflexive, instinctual response for the purpose of creating demand for the wares being sold.
Eid has been commodified to a significant degree, but thus far it hasn’t crossed that line of tapping into sensual desires to evoke an attachment with the wares being peddled. But this year we’ve even seen a cattle fashion show, where models walked onto the catwalk holding the reins of a large cow or goat and doing their best to look alluring. Nothing further needs to be said.
Today, Eid sees sales of refrigerators and deep freezers hit a peak. Medicines designed to aid digestion are emptied out from pharmacies. New and innovative collaborations to pool collectively for a single sacrifice are advertised on billboards. Mobile phone companies advertise new package offerings, and launch SMS messages with stylised Eid greetings in the hope of generating massive traffic as they get forwarded around.
Sales of cattle hit such a peak across the country, that cattle herders from as far away as Kandahar make the long journey on foot to the large cattle marts of Punjab. Many years ago, when I was in Mianwali for a shoot on the Kalabagh dam, I was told by people there of a massive migration that takes place every year by Afghan cattle herders, who prepare their flocks all year for the bonanza on Eid, and start marching them from places as far away as the Afghan countryside, making a months-long voyage on foot to eventually settle on the outskirts of Multan or Lahore and sell their animals. Some amongst them pass by Mianwali on their long journey, and it was claimed by some of the older generation, that these nomads have been making this journey for centuries, unencumbered by the borders that have come up in the meantime.
This Eid let’s try and remember a little of what the occasion is really supposed to be about. It’s not about whose herd is bigger, or fatter, or can feed more people, or has the healthier fur. The occasion of Eid is about the spirit of sacrifice in the name of devotion. It is about values far larger than what the culture of consumerism can ever conceive. It is about paying tribute to something greater than us, greater than our desires, greater than our aspirations to rise above the herd we live amongst. It is about transcending the base desires that tie us to the ephemeral things of this world.
Let’s also embrace that sacrificing an animal is not obligatory for everyone, but attaining the realisation of this higher state of mind, or at least taking one day out of our busy lives to acknowledge the values that inspired this occasion, is what makes the occasion so special.
The culture of consumerism has taken into its fatal embrace many of our special occasions, and reduced them to its fetishisation of the commodity, the thing available for sale that is designed to gratify our base desires. Marx once described the cheap prices of England’s commodities following the Industrial Revolution as the artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls. He used Chinese walls as a metaphor, not literally, meaning that flooding the world with cheap goods to satisfy wants was the power with which the industrial system and its attendant way of life surmounted all obstacles.
Today, these walls have been battered down, and the culture of consumerism has been internalised by everyone to the point where the most sacred values of the past have been pulled into its service. So in the true spirit of Eid, from a heart humbled by the weight of the sacrifices we have to make to regain our humanity, let me wish all my readers Eid Mubarak!
The writer is a member of staff.
Twitter: @khurramhusain
Published in Dawn, September 24th, 2015
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