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One more Eid-ul Azha, the festival of sacrifice, is behind us. Even as the lean strands of meat are getting baked under the sun in Muslim habitations all around the world, we need to introspect if we mortals could garner or imbibe even a fraction of the original spirit of Hazrat Ibrahim, whose act we claim to replicate.
Prophet Ibrahim, peace be upon him, was the humblest of God’s servants. Leaving his ancestral land for the sake of Allah, he wandered through parched landscapes, settling his coveted progeny in the sun-scorched valleys of Palestine and Hijaz. Responding to the divine call of the dream, he not for a moment, baulked at the thought of sacrificing his dear son Ismail, the blessed gift from Allah in the evening of his life.
But Eid-ul Azha is no more than an occasion to herald a great gastronomical bonanza. How many of us really rise above the ritual? It was not meant to be so.
What we have today is devoid of the Abrahamic spirit, bereft of the essence we ought to have imbibed, fails to foster the sense of dedication in the path of God. Abraham was no ordinary soul. He was a born rebel against the ways of his time, daring to challenge the powers that be, the traditions that held sway over the human minds. A man who triggered great tumult in the family, sent convulsion in the community and shook the society by its roots, he was a great reformer, a restorer of doctrine of submission to God. A crusader in the path of monotheism, his passage to the truth was circuitous, arduous, and involved hostilities that demanded nothing less than his life. Mocking at the false gods, he incurred the familial wrath. His ordeal by fire at the hands of King burnished his devotion. He did not hesitate for a moment when the divine call came upon him to leave the land of ancestors. His devotion was solely to Allah, for no father would scatter his pair of sons over the so arid and expansive a landscape as of today’s Middle East.
But few of us today would pause and think of supreme sacrifices made by Ibrahim (peace be upon him). Mist of history has not rendered his ideal so much fuzzy as our instinctive repulsion to anything that places demand on our time, energy, resources and above all the super self and ego. Few among those who do so, can withstand a fraction of what Hazrat Ibrahim exemplified through his trials and tribulations.
So many millions do the ritual sacrifice annually. But why is it that they make so little impact on the society, so few are available to bring about a change in the vital sectors of life, so little resources are offered to combat hunger, illiteracy, disease and homelessness. How many of us are willing to take a sallow complexioned spouse of sterling character against the general craving of a tall, fair, handsome one with less preferable personal credentials? Look how the worldly cravings get into our ill-trained minds just as the rain gets into the thatched roof. How many of us are ready to call off our umpteenth Ramadan-eve umrah trip in order to divert those resources for combating hunger in our impoverished neighbourhood? Think of your preference among choices between upholding the truth and succumbing to the lures of favours and threats of denials. Try judging your own response to a call of conscience to swallow pride in order to patch up with your spouse or siblings forgetting the hurt inflicted from those quarters. Most of us would find our responses less than desirable, totally inconsistent with the sanctimonious posturing we indulge in on the eve of the festival of sacrifice.
Eid-ul Azha is only a reminder of the great sacrifice of Hazrat Ibrahim. No prejudices should keep us off this path; no love for worldly possessions should deter us from offering the best assets; no intimidation should coerce us from the declaration of truth; no personal interests should come in the path of deviating us from the righteousness. Deficiency of commitment on these score should trigger the process of self examination.
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