Eid al-Aḍḥā Khuṭbah: Sacrifice and Desires

As-salāmu ʿalaykum wa raḥmatu-Llāhi wa barakātuh. All praise is for Allāh, who has gathered us this blessed morning. Peace and blessings upon His beloved Messenger Muḥammad ﷺ, his family, and his companions. My dear brothers and sisters, Eid Mubārak.

Dear brothers and sisters, on this blessed day of Eid al-Aḍḥā, we have come out to a day that the whole earth seems to be calling Allāh great. The takbīrāt have rung from our mouths since the dawn, the people of Minā are completing their pilgrimage, and across every Imām Muslim land a quiet animal will, today, be laid down for the sake of Allāh. We have come for two short rakʿahs, and then I wish to speak with you, plainly and from the heart, about one thing: what sacrifice actually is, and what it is that Allāh is asking us to sacrifice.

What sacrifice means

Allāh subḥānahu wa taʿālā tells us in Sūrat al-Ḥajj, and listen carefully, because in one sentence He explains the entire meaning of this day.

Notice what the verse says, and notice what it does not say. It does not say that Allāh refuses the offering. It says that what travels up to Him is not the flesh and not the blood. What travels up to Him is your taqwā, the careful watching of yourself in front of Allāh, the inner shield you place between yourself and the things that displease Him. The classical commentators are united on this. Allāmah al-Ṭabarī explains the verse with a single line: what reaches Him is mā urīda bihi wajh Allāh, that which was intended for the face of Allāh. Allāmah al-Qurṭubī, citing Ibn ʿAbbās (raḍ. ʿanhumā), reminds us that the people of the Jāhiliyyah used to smear the walls of the Kaʿbah with the blood of their offerings, as if Allāh were a god who needed feeding. The Muslims almost did the same, until this verse came down and put the matter to rest. And Allāmah al-Qurṭubī ends with a line that the children among us should remember: the verb ‘to reach’ cannot be related to the Creator literally; it is used figuratively for acceptance. Whatever is offered with sincerity is what He accepts.

Allāmah Ibn ʿĀshūr in al-Taḥrīr wa-al-Tanwīr pushes the point further. He says the shedding of blood and the cutting of flesh are not themselves the act of worship. They are the means by which good is brought to other people through the offering. The meat is for the poor. The taqwā is for the Lord. That is the division this verse draws, and once you have seen it, you cannot un-see it.

So when a child asks today, why are we slaughtering an animal, the answer is not, because Allāh wants the meat. The answer is, because the outward act is a sign. The sign points to something that is happening inside us. The classical scholars call this ʿalāmah ʿalā amr bāṭin, an outward mark of an inward state. Our beloved Prophet taught us, in the hadith every student of knowledge learns first.

Imām al-Bukhārī placed this hadith at the head of his Ṣaḥīḥ, and Imām Ibn Rajab al-Ḥanbalī observes in Jāmiʿ al-ʿUlūm wa-al-Ḥikam that he set it in the place of a khuṭbah for the whole collection, as a sign that every action not done seeking the face of Allāh is null and void. The same logic governs the sacrifice of Eid. If the knife is sharp and the animal is healthy and the meat is shared with the neighbours, but the heart inside the chest of the one offering is not turned to Allāh, then nothing has reached Him at all. The sheep, you might say, has died for nothing.

Ibrāhīm and the outer–inner correspondence

This is exactly why we re-tell, on this day, the story of our father Ibrāhīm (ʿalayh al-salām). Allāh has chosen to give us this story in Sūrat al-Ṣāffāt.

The Qurʾān, as Allāmah Ibn ʿĀshūr notes, deliberately does not name the son in this passage. The lesson lies not in his name but in his submission. And the centre of gravity of the whole story is in three small words: fa-lammā aslamā, when they had both submitted. Qatādah (raḥimahu Allāh), quoted by Allāmah al-Ṭabarī, captures the meaning perfectly: this one, the son, submitted himself to Allāh; that one, the father, submitted his son to Allāh. Each one offered up the thing that was his to offer.

And here is the great mercy of the story. Ahl al-Sunnah, as Allāmah al-Qurṭubī records, hold that the actual slaughter never took place. What took place was the command of the slaughter and the willingness for the slaughter. Ibrāhīm (ʿalayh al-salām) had already fulfilled the dream before the knife touched anything, because the inward act had already been completed in his heart. Allāh then said to him, qad ṣaddaqta al-ruʾyā, you have already fulfilled the dream. The ram, the dhibḥ ʿaẓīm, was sent down to take the place of the son not because the son’s flesh was needed, but because Ibrāhīm’s inward sacrifice had already been accepted. Allāmah al-Qurṭubī adds the precise note: the ram is called ʿaẓīm, great, not because of the size of its body but because of the greatness of its rank (ʿaẓīm al-qadr), since it was the ransom of a Dhabīḥ and a substitute that Allāh Himself accepted.

Brothers and sisters, do you see the pattern? The outward is the visible echo of the inward. The animal lies down on the earth only after the soul has lain down before Allāh. The sheep at the gate is the sequel to a quiet naʿam, a yes, that the heart has already given. If we do not give that yes today, then no matter how many animals are slaughtered, the rite of Ibrāhīm has not been performed in us.

The desire as god

Now, dear brothers and sisters, the question is sharp. Most of us will not be tested with what Ibrāhīm (ʿalayh al-salām) was tested with. None of us will be asked, on this day, to give up our son. So what is it that we, here, this morning, are being asked to lay down on the ground in front of Allāh?

The Qurʾān gives the diagnosis in a single, frightening verse. In Sūrat al-Jāthiyah.

Allāmah al-Rāghib al-Aṣfahānī observes in his Mufradāt that the very word hawā is named for its downward motion, from the root h-w-y, which means to fall. al-Shaʿbī (raḥimahu Allāh), quoted by Allāmah al-Qurṭubī, makes the play of the word explicit: hawā is called hawā because it makes the one who follows it fall (yahwī) into the Fire. And Ibn ʿAbbās (raḍ. ʿanhumā) says, in the same place, that Allāh has not mentioned the word hawā anywhere in the Qurʾān except to blame it.

Allāmah Ibn ʿĀshūr, the great Tunisian commentator, draws out the lesson for us with care. This verse, he says, is a warning to the believer no less than to the disbeliever, that one’s religious life must be driven by the proofs of revelation, not by what the self happens to want. The hawā is not desire as such; desire has been placed in us by Allāh. The hawā is the disordered direction of the self, the downward tilt that takes us where we want to go rather than where we have been told to go. The Prophet said, as Allāmah al-Qurṭubī records on this verse, none of you truly believes until his desire is in submission to what I have brought.

So now the answer to our question becomes clear. The qurbān we are asked to offer, the act of drawing near that the very word qurbān names, is the placing of our own hawā on the ground in front of Allāh, the same way Ibrāhīm (ʿalayh al-salām) placed Ismāʿīl. Al-Rāghib reminds us that the root q-r-b is the root of nearness, and qurbān is named from it because the offering is, in its essence, the act of drawing near. The animal is the small material counterpart. The real offering is whatever it is, in your nafs, in your self, that keeps you at a distance from your Lord.

And brothers and sisters, our Messenger has told us what that real offering is. In a hadith reported by Faḍālah ibn ʿUbayd (raḍ. ʿanhu) and graded ḥasan ṣaḥīḥ by Imām al-Tirmidhī, the Prophet said:

Allāmah al-Mubārakfūrī, commenting on this hadith in Tuḥfat al-Aḥwadhī, says a sentence that should be written across every Imām Muslim heart: the struggle against the self is the root of every struggle, for as long as a person does not struggle against his own nafs, the struggle against the outward enemy is impossible. Imām al-Ghazālī, in his Iḥyāʾ ʿUlūm al-Dīn, calls this the greater struggle. That phrase, al-jihād al-akbar, Imām al-Ghazālī presents as the framing of some of the early Companions. The prophetic hadith we cite is the one from Imām al-Tirmidhī, and it is enough.

Three pictures from the Iḥyāʾ

Brothers and sisters, allow me now to take you for a few minutes into the workshop of Imām al-Ghazālī. In the Iḥyāʾ, he gives us three pictures of the nafs that lives inside the chest of every one of us. These three pictures together explain why our Prophet said:

Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar in Fatḥ al-Bārī gives us a sentence that we should all carry home: the bitterest enemy of a person is his shayṭān and his nafs, and anger only arises from these two. Whoever struggles against them until he overpowers them is also the stronger over himself in subduing desire. And Allāmah al-Bayḍāwī, quoted in the same place, makes the diagnosis even sharper: all the corruptions that befall a person come from his desire (shahwa) and his anger (ghaḍab). This is the patient on Imām al-Ghazālī’s table.

The four creatures in the chest

The first picture Imām al-Ghazālī gives us is from Kitāb Sharḥ ʿAjāʾib al-Qalb of the Iḥyāʾ, which he calls ʿAjāʾib al-Qalb, The Wonders of the Heart. He says, and listen to the image carefully, because it is meant to startle:

Children among us, please listen, because Imām al-Ghazālī is speaking to you too. He says: every one of us has these four creatures inside us. The pig is our appetite, the hunger and greed that never knows when to stop. The dog is our anger, the biting and snapping when we do not get our way. The devil is the one who keeps poking the pig and the dog and setting them on each other. And the sage, the wise one, is the mind that Allāh gave us, whose job is to keep all three of the others in order. When the sage rules, said Imām al-Ghazālī, justice appears in the kingdom of the body and the whole walks upon the Straight Path. When the pig and the dog rule, the human, even in human form, is no longer a human at all.

ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (raḍ. ʿanhu), in a saying that Imām al-Ghazālī cites just before this image, gave us the positive counter-picture: Allāh has vessels on His earth, and they are the hearts. The dearest of them to Him are the most tender, the most pure and the most firm. The most firm in religion, the most pure in certainty and the most tender towards the brethren.

So today, even before you raise the knife on the animal, raise it on one creature in your own chest. Choose the loudest one. Maybe it is the pig: the way you eat without thinking, even past fullness, even past health. Maybe it is the dog: the way your voice rises at your mother, your wife, your husband, your child, the moment something does not go your way. Pick one. Name it. And before this Eid day ends, do not feed it once. That is your first qurbān.

The mount that must be broken in

The second picture is from Kitāb Riyāḍat al-Nafs, The Training of the Self. And here is where he answers the question that every parent and every honest worshipper asks: can a nafs actually change? He says:

Imām al-Ghazālī then asks the lazy objection that we all whisper to ourselves: people do not change. And he answers, look at the falcon, made tame after a life in the wild. Look at the greedy dog taught to take food only when called and to leave it when commanded. Look at the bolting horse brought to obedience under the rider. If the character of an animal can be retrained, how can ours not be? He concludes, and these are his words: if we wanted to uproot anger and appetite entirely so that no trace of them remained, we would never be able to. But if we wanted to make them supple and obedient through riyāḍa, training, and mujāhada, struggle, we could. We have been commanded to do exactly this, and it is the cause of our salvation and of our arrival to Allāh.

al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (raḥimahu Allāh), in a sentence Imām al-Ghazālī cites in the same book, compresses the whole image into a single line: the bolting mount is not more in need of a strong bit, the metal piece in the horse’s mouth by which the rider holds and turns it, than your own nafs is.

Dear brothers and sisters, this is the answer to the misunderstanding that Islām asks us to hate the nafs and try to kill it. Eid al-Aḍḥā is not the day we kill the horse in our chest. It is the day we recommit to breaking it in for the long ride. A wild horse will throw you; a broken horse will carry you to Makkah.

So today, even before you raise the knife on the animal, raise it on the reins. Pick one moment this week, just one, when your nafs is sure to bolt. The moment in the car when someone cuts in front of you. The moment in the kitchen when the rice is burnt. The moment when the child spills the juice on the carpet. And in that one moment, pull the rein. Say nothing for three breaths. That is your second qurbān.

The gate of the stomach

The third and last picture is from Kitāb Kasr al-Shahwatayn, The Breaking of the Two Desires. He opens the book with a single claim, and on this day of Eid, when our houses will soon fill with the smell of cooking meat, every one of us must hear it:

Imām al-Ghazālī then lays out a chain that he says links seven evils to this one gate. From the desire of the stomach follows the desire of the genitals. From those two follows the craving for wealth and status, because wealth and status are the means to expanded eating and marrying. From wealth and status follow envy and rivalry. From envy and rivalry follow boasting and showing off. From showing off follow grudge and hatred. And from grudge and hatred, the human is at last pushed into open transgression and corruption. All of it, he says, is the fruit of leaving the gate of the stomach unguarded.

ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb (raḍ. ʿanhu), in a saying Imām al-Ghazālī cites in the same chapter, captured this with a sentence that lands on the body: beware of the full belly. It is a heaviness in life and a stench in death. Heaviness in life is sluggishness for prayer and dullness in dhikr. Stench in death is, I am afraid to say, the body of the over-fed.

And so, brothers and sisters, on this day when we will eat the meat of our sacrifice, today is exactly the day to remember that the gate exists. Today, even before you raise the knife on the animal, raise it on your own stomach. When the plate is in front of you, leave one third empty, as our Messenger taught us. When the second helping is offered, decline once. That is your third qurbān. And by Allāh, if you guard that one gate, you have already weakened lust, greed for money, greed for status, envy and arrogance, all at once. Open it, and they all walk through together.

These are the three pictures, brothers and sisters. The four creatures in the chest. The mount that must be broken in. The gate of the stomach that must be guarded. Each of them is a nafs lying on the ground in front of Allāh. Each of them is, in the end, what the verse meant when it said yanāluhu al-taqwā minkum, it is the taqwā from you that reaches Him.

The exchange

Dear brothers and sisters, before we close, I want to tell you what Allāh has promised, in His own words, to the one who makes even a small inward sacrifice today. The Messenger of Allāh reported from his Lord, in a ḥadīth qudsī recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ Imām al-Bukhārī:

Look at the exchange, brothers and sisters. Look at it carefully. A hand-span from us is met by a forearm from Him. A forearm from us is met by an arm-length from Him. A walk from us is met by a hurrying from Him. Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar in Fatḥ al-Bārī preserves the explanation of Imām Ibn Baṭṭāl, that this nearness is not a nearness of distance but a nearness of mercy and acceptance: My reward comes to him swiftly. And Allāmah al-Rāghib al-Aṣfahānī, also quoted by Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Ḥajar, makes the link the children should remember: this is a spiritual closeness, not a bodily closeness, and it is achieved by removing the inner pollutants, ignorance, recklessness, anger and the rest, as far as a person is able.

Notice now the root that ties this entire morning together. The Eid offering is called qurbān, from q-r-b, the root of nearness. The forearm in the hadith is called qurb, from the same root. The qurbān we leave outside the masjid points to the qurb that Allāh promises inside the heart. The one is the small material counterpart of the other.

This is why our Prophet was told to say, and we are told to live by:

Mujāhid (raḥimahu Allāh), al-Ḍaḥḥāk (raḥimahu Allāh), Saʿīd ibn Jubayr (raḥimahu Allāh) and Qatādah, as Allāmah al-Ṭabarī records, all read the word nusuk in this verse as the slaughter at Ḥajj and ʿUmrah, precisely the rite of this day. But al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī and al-Zajjāj (raḥimahu Allāh), as Allāmah al-Qurṭubī records, read it more broadly: my religion, my whole act of worship. And Allāmah Ibn ʿĀshūr, looking at the four nouns together (ṣalāh, nusuk, maḥyā, mamāt), says they spell out the whole meaning of Islām, whose root is the surrender of the self to the One submitted to.

So this is the exchange Allāh is offering us today. You give Him a hand-span of your nafs, and He gives you back a forearm of His mercy. You walk towards Him, even one step, and He comes to you hurrying. You give Him your ṣalāh, your nusuk, your maḥyā, your mamāt, and He accepts the whole of you as His. That is the return. That is the reward. That is what the sheep at the gate has been pointing to, all along.

Closing

Brothers and sisters, let us close as our Messenger taught us, with ṣalāh upon him and with the prayers of the righteous.