Pilgrims hurl pebbles at pillars to relive Abraham chasing Satan away
On the Feast of the Sacrifice, pilgrims at Mecca throw stones at pillars marking where, by Islamic tradition, Satan tried to talk Abraham out of obeying God. The festival honours a father ready to give up his son, and the ram sent from heaven so that he did not have to.
Eid al-Adha is the second of Islam's two principal festivals, the other being Eid al-Fitr. It falls on the 10th day of Dhu'l-Hijja, the twelfth and last month of the Islamic calendar, and festivities usually continue through the three Tashreeq days that follow. In many countries it is simply the Greater Eid, al-Id al-Kabir; Turkish speakers call it Kurban Bayrami, and in Iran and the Indian subcontinent the name is pronounced Eid al-Azha.
The day begins with a special congregational prayer, after which families carry out the udhiyah, the ritual slaughter of a livestock animal. For those on the Hajj it is also a busy day of pilgrimage rites, including circling the Kaaba, walking between two hills and the stoning ritual, which carries on over the days after.
The underlying story tells of Abraham, Ibrahim in Arabic, dreaming repeatedly that he was sacrificing his son and taking the dreams as a divine command. In the Quranic telling the son agrees to submit. As they prepared, Satan tried to dissuade the family, and Abraham drove him off with pebbles. The Angel Gabriel then announced that Abraham had fulfilled what was asked and offered a ram in the boy's place. Muslims overwhelmingly identify the son as Ishmael, the elder, rather than Isaac, whom the Bible names; the episode matches the Akedah, the Binding of Isaac in Genesis chapter 22, and appears in the Quran's 37th surah.
The words carry their own history. Eid means festival or feast day and is linked to an Arabic root about returning and repetition, though the scholar Arthur Jeffery argued it was borrowed from Syriac. Adha and qurban both mean sacrifice or offering. Curiously, the sacrificial sense of the root behind adha turns up in the Hadith, not in the Quran, and Assyrian and other Middle Eastern Christians use the same word for the Eucharistic host.
Source: Eid al-Adha
