What does the sacrifice bring us closer to?

Today is the first day of the Feast of the Sacrifice. Whatever time anyone may be living in, the feast comes and takes back its own time and bursts into our lives.

This is a characteristic of all feasts. A feast is a resetting of history's clock, and however far removed a person may feel, it reminds him that he is not so very far away, and that his opportunities to return to a more genuine history, a more genuine time, are endless. This characteristic exists in the Ramadan fast and in the feast of that fast. However far one travels in the flow of history, a comprehensive will that returns us each year to our own time makes its entire presence felt in the feasts. The feast continues to give, strongly, the feeling that against all the speed or course of change in history there is always a "near" harbor to which one can return.

Whatever may have happened in between, what was done at this time in last year's feast will be done again this year. What was being done in Mecca and Medina 1400 years ago will be done the same this year. People who pass through the same experiences can be so close to one another, so "karib" (near), because of this feast.

Qurban means to approach, to draw near, nearness. The Sacrifice is an occasion for removing the distances and separations that people place between themselves because of their professions, titles, class positions, ethnic positions, and some different traits that they either choose or do not choose. While drawing the human being nearer to God and to nature, it also draws different people nearer to one another. Especially because of the element of charity it contains, the sacrifice brings rich and poor closer, and given the global geography the Muslim nation has reached today, while bringing east and west, north and south closer, today we can be amazed to be sure that it does one more thing very well. It places the people of today and the people of periods thousands of years ago within the same time as one another. In an instant all of us become contemporaries of Abraham and Ishmael.

Let not this consciousness of contemporaneity seem exaggerated: it also brings Muslims, Jews and Christians closer, and enables them to understand one another. It reminds them that they all belong to the same family of consciousness and existence. If an occasion for rapprochement and understanding is to be sought, the event of the Sacrifice, which is being lived today in all its vitality, can be a very sound starting point.

At this time, debates over whether it was Isaac or Ishmael who was sacrificed may revive, and these debates may be somewhat divisive. The debates over whether Abraham sacrificed Ishmael or Isaac have generally been concluded in favor of the former. When the relevant texts are examined, the general opinion shows that it was Ishmael. But it must particularly be noted that some of the Muslim scholars have said that the one sacrificed may also have been Isaac. This disagreement is, in my view, very meaningful; at the least it shows that Muslims have no complex on this matter. For Muslims, who make no distinction among the prophets, there is no difference between the sacrifice of one of two sons, each loved and honored as a prophet. If the problem is the allotment of the honor of being sacrificed, it makes no difference whether it belongs to Ishmael or Isaac. For the Jews, however, Isaac's being sacrificed has become not an honor but a privilege. It means not that a people, a race, finds honor in the person of Isaac, but that it becomes the holder of a privilege. Muslims, on the other hand, even if this honor belonged to Isaac, do not feel deprived of that honor. Even so, that the one sacrificed was Ishmael must naturally be a separate decree of God, whose wisdom needs to be reflected upon.

In spite of everything, the event of the sacrifice itself, with its quality of being a sufficiently common tradition, has an indisputable function of bringing different religions near and closer to one another.

Since qurban means approaching, drawing near, we can also make this consideration. To approach one place is to make a choice. To choose to approach one place also entails choosing to move away from many other places. A person cannot approach two points in opposite directions at the same time. Therefore, the sacrifice offered to God brings one near to God, near to the life, the way of thinking, the whole of attitudes that God proposes, and in return the one who makes this choice moves away from what stands opposite to God.

This is the essence of the Muslim's sacrifice, and when it is understood this way it is seen that it is not limited to merely slaughtering an animal. Perhaps the sacrifice as a ritual is a stage that represents the Muslim's way of life as a whole. Moreover, when the sacrifice is understood thus, it is seen that it is not peculiar to Muslims only, nor even to those who believe in a particular religion. Everyone, while approaching one place with what they prefer, limitlessly moves away from other places. With an action performed, all the alternative actions to it are in a sense sacrificed too. By doing one action, countless other actions are renounced.

In this sense the sacrifice is actually a level of human existence from which no one can remain outside. Everyone lives life as a "sacrifice" and a "moving away." What matters is who chooses what as the qibla in this act of sacrifice, in whose name he performs the sacrifice.

In this framework the sacrifice, as an approach and a moving away, is the most fundamental level of human existence. If the human being consists of preferences, then human action itself is a sacrifice. But what one is sacrificed to is of course debatable.

I congratulate you on your feast, which I wish may be an occasion of drawing near to God.

Note: Last year a very fine edition was published of the book containing the papers of the International Sacrifice Symposium organized by the Bayrampaşa Municipality and the Presidency of Religious Affairs. I congratulate this book, in which the event of the sacrifice was for the first time in Turkey addressed in all its dimensions, as a very fundamental step toward rescuing the Feast of the Sacrifice from low-level debates and making it the subject of more substantial reflections.