Ode to the Sheep

Bonjour,

Tomorrow nearly everyone in Morocco will be celebrating Aid al Kabir. It’s the biggest holiday of the year for devout Muslims, and it involves lots of feasting and traveling, as families gather together.

At the center of the holiday is the sacrifice of millions of sheep. The holiday celebrates the story in the Koran (and in the Bible and in the Torah) about Abraham. To test Abraham’s faith, God directed him to sacrifice his young son, Isaac. After Abraham built the altar and prepared to kill his son, God rewarded Abraham’s faith by giving him a ram to sacrifice instead.

Karim, our guard, says that all Muslims are obligated to buy a sheep (at a price equal to one-month’s salary), kill it and eat it during the feast (and in the days to follow). Other families have less strict interpretations of this rule (some Muslims we know donate money to charity in lieu of buying a sheep, for example). But some families feel great pressure to conform, and some leave town to avoid the holiday and/or their neighbors’ scrutiny.

Aside from the religious significance of tomorrow's events, from a practical perspective, there have been sheep everywhere for the last week or so. You see them on street corners, at the produce stands, in small carts wheeled through the medina, thrown into wagons and the backs of trucks, and in our neighbor’s backyard tool-shed.

Some of the sheep look terrified and unhappy, like when I tried to get a photo at one stand and they all tried to squeeze into the farthest corner.

Some of them seem complacent, even contented, nuzzling their humans much like dogs.

Some sheep vendors sell bags of charcoal next to the pens of sheep.

Outside of the Marjane (Morocco's answer to Target), there is a huge sheep market, but I didn't get too close.

All of this, for me, is the most obvious example of how real the connection is here between raising animals and eating meat. Morocco is not like the U.S., where buying meat means just buying food in a sterile, styrofoam tray that is wrapped in plastic. Here, buying meat means you go to the medina or market, point out the chicken you want, watched it get weighed (and thereby priced), and stand by while that chicken is killed, plucked and chopped up.

As harsh as that feels when you walk through the medina, or by the local chicken stand, as a longtime vegetarian, I think it is a good thing. Here, you can’t avoid the fact that before you can eat meat, an animal must die. And here, at least, the animals have almost certainly lived a free-range life before their unpleasant end.

Rachida, our maid, cook and friend, said yesterday that she worries that Americans, like some French, will think Muslims “savages” (her word) because of the sheep. Since it is just one week before Thanksgiving, when Americans will be buying millions of turkeys wrapped in plastic, I told her that Americans are not in a position to judge.

An animal lover, Rachida told me about the sheep she had last year, which would watch television with her and of which she grew very fond, and how hard it was to kill it for Aid. She still thinks about that sheep. And now she won’t keep her sheep at her house; it stays with her neighbor so she won’t grow attached again. (Tommy also reported tonight that some of his friends were distressed at school today, because they didn't want their cute sheep to die).

I’m not sure how it will go tomorrow. For Anna and me, it will probably be unpleasant. For Tommy, who has been the truest vegetarian and most ardent animal-lover in the family, it could be awful. For Bob, it will be (he hopes) a chance to eat some really fresh mutton.

One final note: Bob (always the philosopher) says that it is better for there to be a holiday with the mass slaughter of sheep (along with some billy goats) because if not for this holiday, the sheep never would have been born. And, he claims, better for them to have lived before dying tomorrow, than to have not lived at all.

Tommy disagrees with Bob and thinks it would better if the sheep had not been born. I’m not convinced by Bob’s argument either. Dit-moi (tell me) -- Are you?

A bientot,

Kim