The secrets that defile the sacrifice

Sacrifice stands out in nearly all religions throughout human history as a common ritual, a historical narrative, and a representation transmitted to the present from this narrative. However, its being common to all religions does not mean it is understood in the same way in all of them. It may be said that the shaping of the ritual of sacrifice, the representation in the performance of the ritual, and all the details of its narration also show how religions differ.

Approaches that see sacrifice as an attempt to appease a god who is angry and ready to inflict every kind of harm on people out of his wrath, as compensation for property or possessions stolen from him, or as part of a transaction in a sharing of sovereignty between humankind and god. Beliefs in gods who are wrathful toward humans, jealous, and rivals have influenced the shaping of the concept of sacrifice throughout history. So much so that today, whenever sacrifice comes up, such a conception of god can come alive in a corner of many people's minds.

It is of course an understanding that has absolutely no place or counterpart in Islamic kalam, but it can infect the minds of Muslims too, perhaps through influences spreading from other religions, perhaps precisely because, sacrifice being a test, it is one of the ordinary reactions a person can give to the event of sacrifice. A god who, having been somehow angered or enraged, must be appeased, and for this needs blood to be shed... We find ourselves obliged to say every time that this is an understanding that has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam's understanding of sacrifice. In Islam there is no Allah who is angry at humans and "needs" blood to be shed to appease this anger. Above all, there cannot be a god who "needs" something. Allah needs nothing. Need and god are things that cannot come together in Islam's belief in Allah.

That sacrifice is nevertheless a common theme in all of them, despite very different conceptions of god, is another proof that the source of all religions is the same. The source is the same, but just as religions can differ almost radically as they move away from this source over time, conceptions of sacrifice can differ to the same degree.

History, above all, offers countless examples of the religions that came with the cause of tawhid being distorted within a short time in a direction opposite to their reason for existence. People have a predisposition to turn even the egalitarian messages that come to them, those emphasizing justice, into a means of privilege over other people within a short time. Even if all people are equal, people can open a path and space for their own superiority through the excessively attractive and tempting door of the idea that "some people are more equal."

Authentic religions, turned into the basic instrument of the idea of the superiority of a race, a nation, a class, a stratum, or a religious group, can thus be subjected to every kind of distortion. At the end of the day, perhaps a generation or two later, we may be faced with a religion that has moved as far as possible from both the purpose and the form with which it was first sent

and that has become something else.

It is actually possible to follow this story not through other religions but through Islam itself. Islamic history is full of sects that have drifted extremely far from the belief in tawhid, the core of the Islamic message, that have contaminated their belief with every kind of shirk, and that keep ever wider the space they open, beside and apart from Allah, for their own cults, mahdis and hocaefendis. In this realm it becomes extremely easy to imagine for oneself a superiority, a privilege, a special quality over other people. Just reckon what sacrifice can become here. Whose drawing near to whom is sacrifice? Whose payment to whom is it, a blood-price? Of which test, of which relationship between Allah and servant is it a declaration of position?

We can also see the differentiation in sacrifice as a way of measuring the differentiation among religions. The account in the Holy Bible, on which Judaism and Christianity rest, which sees the event of sacrifice as a kind of duel between Abraham and Allah, must, according to Islam, be an account touched by human hands (distorted).

The event has many dimensions, of course. That the one sacrificed earlier was Isaac, unlike in Islam, is not the only and more important difference. Why it is so is of course much more important, since according to Islam, between Isaac's really being sacrificed and Ishmael's being sacrificed there is no reason that would increase the merit of one relative to the other. But this approach to the matter of sacrifice by the Judeo-Christian tradition, which cannot find sacrifice fitting for Ishmael, whose progeny it sketches as a racial supremacy, leads in a chain to other moral-theological catastrophes.

One of the catastrophes is that God, as if as a punishment or a challenge, asked Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and that he hid this both from his mother (Sarah) and from Isaac himself. Moreover, when he takes Isaac toward Mount Moriah to sacrifice him, having shouldered the wood with which to burn him after the sacrifice, Isaac is unaware of what will happen to him. With that innocence he asks: "Father! [...) Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering [holocauste)?" Abraham answers: "My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb" (22:7-8).

Here, in the account of the Holy Bible, Abraham openly lies to his son, deceives him. Moreover, the moment his son learns his father's purpose he cannot accept it and falls at his father's feet and tries to dissuade him from his decision. Abraham's sacrifice adventure, as a "secret" whose reason and purpose he cannot disclose to anyone, becomes the subject of serious debates throughout Christian-Jewish theology. The irreparable contradiction thus arising between Abraham's religious faith in God and the ethical rules he must obey will remain one of the most important knots of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, one that can never be undone.

Yet in the Qur'anic account, Ishmael has a belief in what the dream that Abraham had seen repeatedly told him, and, like his father, he asks him to do what needs to be done with complete submission. Because both Ishmael and his father know with certainty (ayn al-yaqin) that life and death belong to Allah and that if one is to die for Allah's sake not the slightest hesitation will be shown on this path. If Allah has commanded death, no one can delay it even by a second, and if He has not commanded it, no one can bring it forward even by a second. It is impossible for one who knows Allah well to quarrel with Allah, to be stubborn with Him, or to hesitate in consenting to His command. Besides, the life that is in Allah's custody does not consist of worldly life alone.

The Judeo-Christian tradition's distorted reading of Isaac, while portraying him as lacking this basic consciousness, perhaps is not even aware that it kills him as a prophet. But even in the account of sacrifice that they attribute to Isaac, whom they have made a cult of on the claim of descending from him and through this cult pose as superior to all people, they end up writing for him a complete ignorance (jahiliyyah) about Allah, and with the secrets they imagine, they have defiled their sacrifices.