Animal Sacrifice: Insights from Anthropologists, Mystics and Philosophers
By
Muhammad Maroof Shah
August 1,
2020
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It is often
asked why not spend money for purchasing animals on the needy. Many are
disturbed by violence and secretly or openly advise God and believers to shun
sacrificing animals on Eid or other occasions including community feast
(niyaz). Pre-Abrahamic origin, mythological and mystical connectio and
trans-religious and transcultural symbolism of sacrifice are either forgotten
or ignored and we don’t find it being discussed in academic forms or mentioned
in sermons. Anthropology, mythology and many traditional sciences are hardly
known in Muslim scholarship. Sophisticated discussions by Sufi sages are also
largely forgotten. A superficial critique of qurbani and prayer food culture
reigns today. A few remarks are here in order to clarify.
Threshing of Grain in Egypt
by The Yorck Project Gesellschaft für Bildarchivierung GmbH (GNU FDL)
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Kimberly
Patton thus describes common features of sacrifice: “Animals are seen as active
subjects from start to finish in the sacrificial process, glorified mediators
between realms, whose cooperation is essential to the efficacy of the ritual,
whose forgiveness is often sought from kinship groups to avert vengeance.”
According
to Patton, classic sacrifice views animals as active and willing participants
in their death. Human participants must seek forgiveness for the violence they
perpetrate and the victim needs to be without blemishes. “The more perfect the
animal (or human being, for that matter), the less it belongs to this
death-dealing, corrugated mortal world, and the more susceptible it is to
election as a sacrificial offering.” Gilhus has noted that Graeco-Roman
sacrifice traditionally ended in a “sacred meal, which was the closing act of
the sacrificial process.” For Sterckx, the communal sacrificial feast served to
cement social relationships in ancient China, “The acceptance or refusal to
accept sacrificial meats functioned as symbolical reaffirmation or rejection of
interpersonal and interstate allegiances.” J.Z. Smith argues in his essay “Bare
Facts of Ritual”: “Ritual is a means of performing the way things ought to be
in conscious tension to the way things are in such a way that this ritualized
perfection is recollected in the ordinary, uncontrolled, course of things.”
Reverend
Toyota draws our attention to the fact increasingly lost sight of by moderns
who have lost the sense of food as sacrament, an idea forcefully articulated in
The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature and argues that the
consumption of meat is not problematic per se, as animal flesh transforms into
human flesh but what is problematic is when one consumes meat and is more
concerned about its taste than the fact that it came from living beings. For
Toyata while eating these lives we should also say, “I’m sorry” and “thank
you.” That’s because we take away their lives and because we cannot live
without relying on these lives. This recalls Islamic tradition’s emphasis on
seeking forgiveness/expressing gratitude for almost everything we omit or
commit or appropriate. Arguably our every act – from the act of consenting to
be born and building a house and tilling the earth and taking its countless
fruits involves certain kind of violence or is a disturbance of equilibrium. To
live is indeed to injure. No wonder for traditional man seeking forgiveness and
expressing gratitude for all and sundry things constitute an obligation and
orchestrate his life and are keys to finding redemption for taking lives.
It is
noteworthy to revisit debate on vegetarianism in Buddhism that has historically
taken a very strict position and also qualified its strictures in various ways.
While it is remarkable that every tradition had to contend with the hard facts
of life and survival and come up with certain positions for both upholding the
moral imperative inspiring vegetarianism and it is saints especially who
emphasized this, the laity or general populace, generally speaking, from both
Eastern and Western lands, didn’t uphold it and developed various ways of living
with rather than at the cost of animals. And it is not humans versus animals
but a shared trajectory of one life, a life of participation and shared destiny
that confronts us in traditional worlds.
It is
instructive to see how vegetarianism is received and articulated in modern
Japan. As Barbara R Ambrose, to whom I am indebted for some citations here (in
“Partaking of Life: Buddhism, Meat-Eating, and Sacrificial Discourses of
Gratitude in Contemporary Japan”) taking note of various responses, comments, “We
can’t overlook the fact that humans rely on animals in virtually every aspect
of their lives—from food and leather to cosmetics and pharmaceuticals—and are
unable to extricate themselves from this dependency.” In the face of “this
inextricable entanglement,” the only moral option is “recognizing the sacrifice
of the animals and the labour of the producers, through the expression of one’s
gratitude.” Vegetarianism is accused to be guilty of prioritizing animal lives
over plant lives and being a recent Western heresy. It is said to be
un-Japanese and one could transpose this statement to the Islamic and ancient
Vedic cultures as well.
The
Buddhists didn’t boycott meat eating and elaborated the concept of pure meet as
the one not intended for consumption by a Buddhist. Toyota argues that
consuming meat with gratitude while uttering the words “itadakimasu” (“I
gratefully partake of this food”) and “gochisōsama deshita” (“it was a
delicious feast”) was what made a person human. Ambrose brings evidence to show
that “Unlike earlier Buddhist discourses that stigmatized meat consumption or
averted the human gaze from the slaughter, contemporary Japanese discourses
propose that witnessing the killing of animals makes the consumption of meat
wholesome, as long as humans avoid wastefulness and express their gratitude for
the animals’ sacrifice.
Contemporary
Japanese Shin Buddhism embraces a sacrificial logic as a critique of mindless
consumerism. Recognizing the indebtedness of humans to animals, creates an
opening for reflection that makes it possible to see animals as subjects and to
de-stigmatize the labor involved in animal slaughter and the manufacture of
animal-based products.”
Animal
sacrifice requires sacrificing part of oneself and ideal sacrifice is one where
consent of animals is sought and they embrace death, so to speak. And there are
many such cases reported to which many amongst us are witnesses – the animal is
told to lay down and it complies. Why is it that human ritualistic or other
transgressions need to be expiated by sacrificing animals? Why is it that those
intending to offer qurbani are recommended to let grow hair and nails prior to
qurbani? Why is it that it is shedding of animal’s blood that is so significant
traditionally and nothing on earth or other forms of helping the needy can’t
substitute this? Why is it that it is
emphasized we sacrifice with our own hands and paradoxically, ideally,
personally rear and develop a deep fellowship before sacrificing instead of
last-minute buying from market? Development of fellowship with animals is a
clue to the institution of qurbani and it is sadly lacking in our case when
most animals are factory farmed and we don’t spend even few hours with animals
and don’t know the special blessing of sacrificing with our own hands.
We have
also forgotten pervasive animal symbolism and angelic associations with animals
and don’t know how intimacy with animals is a healing and an education and why
it is said that troubles from the above are taken up by animals we rear and if
there are none, humans suffer. Animals humanize us and it is best known by
farmers and butchers who truly care about the art of rearing and slaughtering.
Opposition
to ritual slaughter from certain religious (such as Buddhist) and secularist
quarters isn’t to be summarily dismissed. Its use is to critique extreme
literalism and underscore the point that to God doesn’t reach blood and flesh
besides showing relative value as against the absolute one and contextual
significance of animal sacrifice. Islam has had wide variety of attitudes
towards animals and animal sacrifice which are usually brushed aside.
For
instance, note the case of Ibn Arabi who maintains that “dumb beasts possess an
exalted knowledge and understanding from God, and he concludes that anyone who
considers himself superior to the beasts is ignorant of his own situation.” Ibn
Arabi has also meditated on what he perceived as misreading of dream by Abraham
(AS) and one can build on him and other seers to see how animals/heroes and their
communities are truly saved through qurbani. Both animals and humans are
transformed and not killed through sacrifices.
Post
Script: Having made these points, let it be made
clear that traditional setting and attitudes and saving power of symbols have
largely gone. It is not easy to see how we revive the spirit of an institution
that Abraham exemplified and didn’t initiate as it existed prior to him.
Those who
insist on qurbani thinking it is an obligation for every individual who can
afford it (rejecting majority view of it as sunnah to which salvation can’t be
linked) but don’t develop fellowship with animals or don’t care about how
animals were farmed and other ethical and environmental aspects or costs
involved and go for sacrificing multiple number of animals as a status
statement (as is true for majority of elite who outsource everything from
rearing to slaughtering to distributing) while being callous to the needy
neighbours fail to be redeemed. It is fellow feeling and caring for the other
that is salvific and qurbani is a means for that end and not an end in itself
and that is why public interests or other reasons could modify choice of going
for qurbani. It can be argued that in our setting, keeping in view objectives
of shariah, the letter and spirit of qurbani are better realized if extended
families rather than individuals do it and in the time of Corona, it is done
through organizations that ensure
prevention of spread of disease by butcher and later distribution of meat.
Those who understand origin, development and ramifications of the institution
of animal sacrifice see how one can choose between various legal views on it
(from Wajib to Sunnah, from family to individual basis of doing
it, from individual to community as centre of organizing it and as beneficiary)
and how far it has succeeded in sacrifice of the self for the non-self and if
one has participated or not in higher redeemed life thanks to it.
Philosophers
of major traditions have not conceded the argument that animal sacrifice is
non-ethical. Anthropologists find its evidence almost everywhere and its
counterparts in secularized culture. Philosophy has been defined as preparation
for death. Sages, philosophers and
psychoanalysts have found dialectics of the divine names Wudud/Muhiyy and
Mumeet or God of love and God of death that ground life and death drives, eros
and thanatos as key to the drama of life and culture. We are born astride the grave
as Beckett character puts it. The last
words of Socrates were “Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius, pay it and don’t
forget.” (Asclepius was the God of health and poisoning was release from
dis-ease called life). Not just ancient and medieval philosophers but
postmodern philosophers and writers down to Blanchot have meditated on violence
and death that call for rethinking simplistic vegetarianism and pacifism as
applied to the web of life. Encountering death humanizes. Fleeing death as modern man does as is
glaringly shown by corona scare is a sign of decadence.
To conclude
with Heidegger’s description of human
condition as being-towards-death and his advice to keep visiting graveyards and
Blanchot, whom he influenced, about
death that it is “a power that humanizes nature, that raises existence to
being, and it is within each one of us as our most human quality.”
Original
Headline: Why Sacrifice Animals?
Source: The Greater Kashmir