Like Lambs ...

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Eid al-Adha is an important Islamic holiday. As it honours Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac to God, families celebrate it by killing a sheep. On the day of the Eid over 350 million sheep are killed across the Muslim world. A third of the meat is eaten right away, a third is stored and a third is given to the poor.

In Libya, you could tell when the Eid was approaching, because you would see people – mainly children – walking around the streets with sheep on leashes. A very odd sight, particularly in a city.

We always spent the Eid at Ali Gibril’s house. (To be honest, we always spent at lot of days at Ali’s house, partly because our best friend, Mustafa, lived there and partly because Ali’s wife, Fatma, was an extremely good cook.) As a third of a sheep wasn't enough to feed Ali's family of 15 plus Mustafa, us, etc., we used to pay for Ali to buy a second sheep.

I found the way Ali’s children behaved towards each year’s Eid sheep quite surprising. For several weeks they would treat the sheep as pets, playing with them and taking them for walks. They seemed quite attached to the animals.

Then, on the day of the Eid, they would stand by totally untroubled while Ali cut its throat, removed the fleece and then butchered it.

I can’t imagine most British or American children being so unmoved by the death of an animal that they knew. I remember my cousin Jeanette throwing a positive fit as a child when her dad killed Archibald, one of several chickens that the family kept in the backyard.

In fact, now that I come to think of it, even some British adults found the Eid rather difficult to deal with. Polly was a case in point.

We would sometimes take new teachers around to Ali’s for the Eid. One year, we took Polly, a rather highly-strung young woman who had just arrived from England. I think I might have forgotten to mention in advance some of the details of what was going to happen, because I have never seen anyone look as horrified as she looked when Ali grabbed the sheep and cut its throat. Then, when he cut a hole in its skin and started blowing hard to separate the fleece from the carcass, she totally freaked out.

She made me drive her straight home, where she locked herself in her room. She didn't come to work for the next three days. Ali's family couldn't understand what they had done to upset her. When I told Ali that she was upset by seeing him kill the sheep, Ali was still puzzled. "She eats meat," he said. "Where does she think the meat comes from?"

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