By its nature, a human act is a sacrifice

The sacrifice is not something the human mind can take in at a stroke, easily. Nor is it a subject so plain that human perception could grasp it at a single stroke. As the name itself says, it is a test in any case. A test is a somewhat intricate situation. It is hard. Every test comes with questions that confront us from places we know, or more often do not know. Every newly seen debate enters our lives as a form that completes the worship of sacrifice. One day we find ourselves in the middle of a debate over whether we should slaughter a chicken or a rooster. Another day we face a call for compassion drawing attention to the lively chirpiness of animals and their right to life. And is not the expression from the Qur'an that the meat will not reach God thrust right into our eyes anyway? All of these are at the same time typical whisperings of doubt that confront us on the journey of sacrifice.

They are in part the questions that crowded the head of the Prophet Abraham as he took Ishmael and led him to Aqaba... Of course these questions do not come in a single format. But somehow they come before every festival and settle into our ritual of sacrifice. Perhaps we have to enter the sacrifice constantly by living through this debate. Without living through this debate, the ritual of sacrifice may not be completed. An animal lover, behaving as though he could empathize with the animal, may raise debates such as questions about the animal's life, its being, and its suffering, crowding some questions into our heads and shocking us.

Some distinctions need to be made between questions and whisperings of doubt. I look at the questions here as whisperings of doubt. Of course there may be some legitimate questions. The questions in the mind of the Prophet Abraham as he led his son to sacrifice him, or his questioning whether the dream he saw was true, is a serious questioning. And then there are also the questions that the friends of Satan crowd into one's head as one performs a right action. It is somewhat difficult to tell these apart from each other. But questioning these too is important for grasping the meaning of sacrifice.

We said that kurban is a word in Arabic that means approaching, drawing near. Approaching a place is making a choice. Choosing 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 closer to God, to the life God proposes, to the way of thinking, to the whole of attitudes; in return, the one who makes this choice moves away from the things that stand against God. This is the essence of the Muslim's sacrifice, and when understood this way it is seen that it is not limited to merely slaughtering an animal.

Perhaps, as a ritual, sacrifice is a scene representing the Muslim's way of life as a whole. Moreover, when sacrifice is understood this way, it is seen that it is not peculiar only to Muslims, nor even to those who believe in a particular religion. Everyone, while approaching somewhere through what they prefer, moves away boundlessly from other places. With an action performed, all the actions that are alternatives to it are also, in a sense, sacrificed. By performing one action, one has renounced the performance of countless other actions.

In this sense, sacrifice is a level of human existence that no one can remain outside of. 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. Within this framework sacrifice is the most fundamental level of human existence. If the human being consists of choices, then human action can be looked at as a sacrifice. The trajectory of the Muslim's actions can be thought of as good deeds.

Sacrifice is a worship of very high symbolic density. As declared in the Holy Qur'an, God has need of neither blood nor meat. It is the human being who needs sacrifice, who will be revived by drawing near. The wisdoms of sacrifice being nevertheless commanded, though it is declared that neither its meat nor its blood will reach God, and that rather the intention and God-consciousness in this worship are far more important, are very deep.

Sacrifice works on its own, often without making its effect plainly felt even to those who perform it. The spontaneous effect of the worship having been performed is that it brings people closer to one another. That the literal meaning of kurban is drawing near points to the endless blessing of these wisdoms. The drawing near of what to what is this? The drawing near of the human being to God, of human to human, of soul to body, of the unseen to the witnessed, of this world to the hereafter, of death to life, of identity to identity, of rich to poor, of old to young, of Turk to Kurd, of Arab to non-Arab. All these drawings near are things we witness actually being lived through the direct or indirect effects of the worship of sacrifice. These approaches, which a person left to himself might never choose, are outcomes that occur spontaneously together with the worship of sacrifice, and in which lies the human being's good.

Our working life, our identities, our private lives, and above all the experiences of specialization in modern life divide us, fragment us, separate us. It exposes everyone to the danger of perishing in his own atomized world. Yet sacrifice has been gifted in order to overcome all these solitudes and harmful separations; it is an order offered to the chaos life contains, a providence bestowed.

May your Eid al-Adha be blessed.