Eid Al Adha - Hajj (Part 1)

We have a week off from school this next week.  The holiday is for Eid Al Adha, or the Festival of Sacrifice.  I've learned about a lot of the Muslim holidays over the last four years, but this one is the one that is least familiar to me (partially because its always happened over Christmas break, which overshadows much else for me).  But to learn a little bit more about it, and in an effort to give you an idea of what it is, I'm going to blog about it on each of the important days.

Many people will be cursorily familiar with this Eid as its the time that Muslims go on Hajj, or the pilgrimage to Mecca.  The Hajj is a four day long ceremony - one day of cleansing and three days of various rituals.  A good parallel might be Christmas pageants or Passion Plays that many Christians participate in (at least in the US).  Many of us have performed in plays as children or adults, for the purpose of remembering what happened at Easter and Christmas.  These holidays are remembrances and celebrations of God coming to earth (in the form of Jesus) and Jesus sacrificing himself for our sin and shame. 

My goal is to do four things for each day: 

1.  Talk about the rituals on Hajj

2.  Identify the beliefs driving those rituals

3.  Describe the traditions of people here in Bahrain

4.  See where these beliefs converge and diverge from Christianity

It might be good to point out that these will be fairly general.  People have written whole books on Islam and Christianity, and whole books on small segments of each.  So this isn't an effort to be exhaustive.  Links will probably be provided to give clarity to certain parts that I'm not going to cover here.  

Hope you learn something!