Rectifying the sacrifice: rebuilding Tawhid from Abraham to the modern world

We are in the season of Hajj. A season that is completed with the trial and worship of sacrifice (qurbani). An enlightenment-will in which we realize that God pays the ransom of man's very existence, even of his own sacrifice.

Sacrifice is one of the oldest and most mysterious practices in human history. From the earliest periods of human communities, gifts offered to the gods, bloody rituals, votive offerings, and sacrifices have stood at the center of man's relationship with the sacred. These practices are not merely a form of religious worship; they are also the concrete expression of man's fears, hopes, sense of guilt, and quest for salvation.

The data put forward by anthropologists and historians show that sacrifice often took extremely dramatic forms in human communities. Especially in the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean basin, there are numerous historical records of practices such as child sacrifice. These practices were often seen as the offering of a community's most valuable possession, that is, its own children, to the gods. In this sense, sacrifice is not only an act of worship but also the most extreme expression of man's submission before the sacred.

Modern religious history does not accept that the belief in Tawhid (divine oneness) was a belief lived and realized together with the first human. It rests on a narrative of evolution from polytheistic religions toward monotheistic ones. Understandings and practices concerning sacrifice also find their place in line with this evolutionary narrative. According to it, with the emergence of monotheistic religions a radical transformation is recorded in the idea of sacrifice.

The most symbolic and most dramatic expression of this transformation emerges, without doubt, in the narrative of Abraham. Abraham's being stopped by a divine intervention as he was about to sacrifice his son is not merely a tragic story between a father and a son. In one respect this narrative is the symbolic account of the prohibition of human sacrifice and the substitution of another form of sacrifice in its place. The positivist narrative about how the sacrificial practices recorded in historical sources before the Abrahamic religions arose and developed undoubtedly has a problem of determination. This determination is completed with a retroactive evolutionary narrative. As one goes back into the past, sacrifice will supposedly present a form consonant with man's most primitive, simplest, or most archaic mode of thought.

According to this narrative, the story of Abraham and Isaac in the Torah, which corresponds to a stage of evolution, represents a moment of turning back from the abyss of human sacrifice. God's testing of Abraham and then asking that an animal be sacrificed in place of his son signifies a radical transformation in the practice of sacrifice. Still, the substitution of animal sacrifice for human sacrifice does not mean that sacrifice is abolished altogether. On the contrary, the idea of sacrifice is restructured in a new form.

At this point a paradoxical function of sacrifice emerges. Human sacrifice is prohibited, but the idea of sacrifice is not eliminated. Sacrifice continues, this time in the form of sacrificing an animal instead of a human. Thus sacrifice is both prohibited and preserved in a new form.

Behind this transformation lies not only a theological but also a social and political logic. Sacrificial practices are often rituals that reestablish a society's order, its authority, and its relation to the sacred. For this reason, the complete abolition of sacrifice could also have created a serious vacuum in terms of social order. The prohibition of human sacrifice and the institutionalization of animal sacrifice can be seen as an intermediate solution filling this vacuum.

Another important dimension of the Abraham narrative is closely related to the question of lineage, inheritance, and legitimacy. The tension between Abraham's two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, is not merely a conflict within the family. This tension appears in the sacred texts as a selection of lineage and a construction of legitimacy. The question of through which lineage the divine promises and the covenant will continue stands at the center of the Abraham narrative.

At this point, the relations among Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, and Ishmael cannot be read merely as a family drama. This story is at the same time a narrative of lineage. The question of through which lineage the divine promises will be fulfilled deeply determines the narrative structure of the sacred texts. For this reason the Abraham narrative is not only a story of sacrifice but also a narrative of lineage and legitimacy.

Without doubt, all the religions have reinterpreted this narrative within their own theological frameworks. In Judaism, this narrative is related to the sanctification of a lineage continuing through Isaac. Christianity later interpreted the story within a symbolism connected to the sacrifice of Jesus. Islam regards Abraham's trial as the highest example of faith and submission and interprets the worship of sacrifice as a symbol of this submission. Without ever disregarding the will and participation not only of Abraham but of the child offered as sacrifice.

Despite these different interpretations, in the sum of this story the Abraham narrative has a common meaning: the transformation of the meaning of sacrifice.

In the modern period, the idea of sacrifice has become a subject of debate once again. Modern secular thought in particular has often approached the concept of sacrifice with a critical eye. Many interpretations have been made to the effect that sacrifice is a primitive, irrational, or barbaric ritual. At the same time, some modern thinkers have tried to reassess the symbolic meaning of sacrifice.

For example, Søren Kierkegaard uses the Abraham narrative to explain the tension between faith and ethics. According to him, Abraham's conduct, although it appears incomprehensible from an ethical standpoint, is meaningful from the standpoint of faith. Abraham's absolute submission to God is, in Kierkegaard's thought, the strongest example of the "leap of faith."

In contrast, some modern thinkers have treated the idea of sacrifice within an entirely critical framework. Writers such as Terry Eagleton have tried to reinterpret the concept of sacrifice within modern political and cultural critiques. In such interpretations, sacrifice is often seen as an ideological instrument. However, some of the modern critiques of sacrifice tend to disregard the theological meaning of sacrifice and interpret it merely as a mechanism of power or violence. This approach often does not give sufficient attention to the historical and theological context of sacrifice.

Yet Islam's understanding of sacrifice corresponds to something far beyond simply transforming the meaning of an already existing universal practice. Rather than a change in the meaning of sacrifice, we can speak here of the restoration, correction (tashih), and reconstruction of meaning. Just as the tampering (tahrif) with the religion of Tawhid by Judaism and Christianity, just as all other religions are in fact a transformation of the pure Tawhid that originally existed into something entirely different, sacrifice too has shown a deviation parallel to this.

Islam's correction of its approach to sacrifice in fact runs parallel to the correction of Tawhid as well. The understandings and expectations that took shape around sacrifice can also be seen as a monitor on which one can trace how the conception of a pure hanif Tawhid was distorted by human hands.

The trial of sacrifice is a field in which man's arrogance, calculation, weakness, envy, unbelief, and narrowness of vision before God are displayed. Sacrifice here, in its broadest sense, is a mode of existence. An act that does not consist merely of shedding blood or slaughtering animals and burning their flesh to vapor, or converting it into an economic product and sharing it, but one that, as an action, has very deep and broad meanings.

In order to understand how this is so, and to understand through which existential stations and trials man's journey on earth passes together with sacrifice, it is necessary to take up the idea of sacrifice anew in its historical, theological, and philosophical dimensions alike.

The Abraham narrative is without doubt at the center of this debate in every case. For in order to understand the transformation of the idea of sacrifice, one must grasp the symbolic meaning that this narrative carries.

How the idea of sacrifice is interpreted in the modern world is, without doubt, closely related to how this transformation is understood or misunderstood. For this reason the Abraham narrative is not only a story belonging to the past but also an important field of debate for modern thought. That is why this event, from thousands of years ago, becomes today the reference for all practices, rituals, and philosophical debates concerning sacrifice.