A nightmarish blending of blood and water
The Guardian has more on the rivers of blood in Dhaka yesterday.
Poor drainage in the city makes flooding a regular fact of Dhaka life. But the problem is rarely illustrated as vividly as it was on Tuesday, after thousands of sheep, goats and cows were slaughtered.
One of the two holiest events in the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Adha commemorates the willingness of the prophet Abraham to sacrifice his son at God’s request.
You know, that’s a terrible thing to commemorate. One, there’s the willingness to murder the child, and two, there’s the elevation of blind (and indeed horrific) obedience. It’s an abomination.
Authorities in Dhaka said they had established hundreds of designated sacrifice spots in the run-up to the festival to make it easier to clean away blood and animal carcasses.
Or maybe it would be better just not to “sacrifice” animals at all.
But local media said most residents eschewed the special areas, preferring to make sacrifices in their garages or on the streets outside their homes.
The result was a nightmarish blending of blood and water that filled streets and narrow lanes across Dhaka from Tuesday morning.
“I felt I was walking through a post-apocalyptic neighbourhood,” said Atish Saha, a Dhaka-based artist. “To be honest, I was scared. It was an image of mass violence that shouldn’t ever be experienced.”
Particularly jarring was said to be the sight of families, including infants, wading into the flood in celebratory “Eid day” moods. “It made me speechless,” he said.
Yay, blood and slaughter!
Some theologians try to make this a story against human sacrifice, but it doesn’t really wash. The take-home message is that you should be willing to kill your own child for holy reasons. Slitting the throat of a sinner seems pretty minor in comparison. And you get to practice killing something while feeling holy about it. I like Leonard Cohen’s telling of the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjjaD8UD4J4
I like the idea of calling Abraham’s intention to kill his son an abomination a reversal (even though i don’t know what the word really means.).
There is a nobility of sorts in sacrificing in the name of some worthy goal, exemplified best I think in those medics that eschew a general practice or hospital job in a safe and wealthy nation, and work instead in some impoverished nation. But it doesn’t need to be something so notable as that, there are worthwhile sacrifices of a more mundane nature going on all the time. Many people sacrifice their own time for the sake of building a business, or sacrifice their job to salvage a relationship, or their money to give to charity…
People are doing this all the time, with some sort of tangible reward for someone or something, here on earth. Religious sacrifice on the other hand involves sacrificing something for the veneration of a deity that is claimed to be infinte and therefore doesn’t need shit, he just wants people to go without something in a fit of performative piety. It’s sacrifice still, but it’s a sacrifice for no practical gain anywhere.
And another horrifying aspect of all this is that random people take their hand to the job of animal slaughter, without having any skill at it. I briefly watched some of the footage linked to in the prior post on this topic, and was taken aback by the sheer amateurish slaughter method: restrain the animal, then nervously peck at its throat with a knife until it is debilitated enough that the person has a surge of bravery enough to step in and finally finish the creature off.
Amateur slaughter is quite simply torture.
How much blood? My first thought was that it might be iron oxide from local soil runoff. But the color isn’t right for that.
In how many years has an equal torrent of blood been shed, without being spread by rain? The possible health hazards must have been nearly as great.