Huff Post: by James Goodman –

What I see in Eid Al-adha is something else: a celebration with deep connections to both Christianity and Judaism. The deepest of those connections is the spectacle, past and present, of countless deeply devout people taking a sacred story into their own hands as if it were a clump of soft clay and remaking it in their own image.

Starting on Monday evening, at the very height of the Haj, Muslims around the world will observe Eid Al-adha, the Festival of the Sacrifice, a four-holiday that celebrates Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to God.

Millions will converge on holy sites in Medina and Mecca, and if the past is prologue, here in the West, we will see images and read accounts of the festival that suggest (at their most generous) its strangeness — especially the sacrifice of a hundred million animals (each family consumes a third, shares a third with friends, and gives a third to the poor); the stoning of three great pillars (representing the devil); and a version of the sacrifice story in which Ishmael is the nearly sacrificed son.

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