When I was a kid however, I went to my fair share of Sunday school classes, so I’ve picked up at least a passing knowledge of the main Bible stories. One of my favorites was always the story of Abraham and how he almost sacrificed his own son to God.
Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. Ishmael, for various reasons, had been banished from Abraham’s household. Isaac was the only son still living under the family’s roof.
Abraham’s faith in God was legendary. There wasn’t anyone who believed in or trusted and loved God as much as Abraham, but God decided to test Abraham’s faith anyway. God sent a series of dreams to Abraham, and in those dreams He told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac.
We all know that a parent’s instinct to protect his child is easily one of the strongest instincts a human being has. So for God to order Abraham to kill his own son was pretty severe. And what’s even more severe, what’s over the top fanatical, is that Abraham said yes.
Abraham didn’t say yes immediately. He did have to pray about it for a while. Abraham prayed, and God sent him some more dreams, and when Abraham was sure the command was coming from God, Abraham said to God, “God, if you really want me to do it, you must have a good reason. You bet, I’ll kill my own son.”
Abraham took his son Isaac up to the top of a nearby mountain and laid out his son for the sacrifice. Moments before Abraham did the dirty deed, moments before he plunged a knife into his own son’s body, God sent an angel to the mountaintop and the angel said to Abraham, “Whoa, stop, God is just testing you, you don’t actually have to kill your son. Let your son go. Here’s a ram, sacrifice this ram instead.”
I imagine that Abraham and Isaac were both immensely relieved about this last-minute change of plans.
Growing up as a kid, reading this story in the Bible and learning about it in Sunday school, I assumed the story of Abraham was a Christian story. Of course, later when I learned how to put two and two together I realized that this story, one of the first stories in the first book of the Old Testament, was a Jewish story long before Christianity even existed.
Fast-forward 25 years and I was living in a Muslim land. In my first few months in Turkey I got to observe the Kurban Bayram (meaning “Feast of the Sacrifice”) holiday. This is one of the holiest holidays on the Muslim calendar. When you watch the news on TV and see millions of Muslim pilgrims descending on Mecca wearing white caps and white robes and sandals and converging on a stone square to throw pebbles at a pillar, that’s Kurban Bayram, known as Eid el-adha in Arabic.
The first time I encountered this holiday I learned that in observance of it Muslims slaughter sheep. They don’t slaughter the sheep in a polite, sanitized sort of way. The procedure is dictated by religious scripture, but it is still bloody, violent, and gruesome. Those of us who are accustomed to our meat coming to us in shrink-wrapped styrofoam from a grocery store’s refrigerator case would be shocked. An entire family will walk down to the market together, buy a live ram, and take it back to their home. Right there in their own courtyard where their children play they will grab the ram by its nose, tilt its head back to expose its neck, and slit its throat. Blood will spray everywhere, the ram will collapse onto the ground, and then the family will butcher it.
I saw this going on and I thought, “Oh my god, what kind of country am I living in? What kinds of people do something like this and call it holy? They’re killing innocent sheep with their bare hands, and calling it a holiday. Who are these people?”
Well, I found out they don’t call this holiday “Feast of the Sacrifice” because they are killing a ram and eating it. They call it “Feast of the Sacrifice” because they are celebrating Abraham’s devotion to God, a devotion so strong he would sacrifice his own son. They are celebrating the same story I grew up with as a kid. On their holiest of holidays Muslims are celebrating a story I thought Christians and Jews owned.
What’s more, just like the Jewish and Christian reverence for Abraham does not begin nor end with that single story, the Muslim reverence for Abraham doesn’t begin nor end with that single story either. Ibrahim, the local pronunciation of the name Abraham, is one of the most common male names in Turkey and the Middle East. Being named Ibrahim is like being named Bill or Steve. Muslims have taken the same man Jews and Christians revere and they have placed him at the very center of their world.
When I learned that, it set the tone for my 6 years in Turkey. This is the tone it set:
If you think of the entire human experience as a pie chart, the things that set us apart from each other are a tiny piece of that pie. Maybe 5% at most. The things we have in common, the things that make us the same, make up the other 95% of the pie.
Human nature being what it is, we humans focus on and obsess over the 5%. We plaster our headlines with the 5%. We think the 5% drives the world around us. What actually drives the world around us is the 95%. When we allow our obsession with the 5% to control our actions, we let the tail wag the dog.
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Abraham’s children” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]