Berkley Center

“Knife-sellers love this time of the year.” Professor Mbaye, the psychologist who runs the organization where I intern in Dakar, began one of his passionate tangents after an office meeting on our first day back at work after Tabaski. Called Eid al-Adha in many other Muslim countries, it is the biggest holiday of the year, and the consumerism that surrounds the season was the subject of the professor’s rant this day.

His knife jab was in reference to the equipment necessary for the central event of the Tabaski proceedings: every Muslim household must slaughter at least one sheep, offered as a sacrifice to parallel that of Abraham. According to the Qur’an, God asked Abraham to sacrifice his own son Ishmael, but upon seeing his follower’s obedience, commanded that a sheep be killed instead. In twenty-first-century Dakar, this means a mass influx of smelly, shorthaired moutons bleating by the thousands in tents along the sidewalks in the weeks before Tabaski. After weeks of climactic hubbub, my host family’s actual slaughtering did not disappoint in terms of blood and gore.

What did surprise me a bit even after two months in contradiction-steeped Senegal was the commercialization of so many aspects of this holiday. Every product seemed to be linked to Tabaski by promoters. Petty crime escalated in the weeks before as households sought to fulfill their obligation to purchase a sheep (or to prove their wealth by buying several). Tailors like my neighbor Ousman worked into the wee hours of the morning to meet the demand for fancy fitted traditional clothing. Perhaps most symbolic of these cultural curiosities was the giant billboard on the main highway that depicted an excited older man in colorful traditional garb, a sheep on his left and an envelope of crisp CFA bills on his right. ”Khar ak Khaliss” it reads, promising that two sheep and the equivalent of 50 USD will be given away each day as part of a bank’s special Tabaski sweepstakes.

While the prevalence of livestock makes it easy to think of this product promotion and material focus as something foreign and somewhat quaint, Tabaski is more complex than a simple competition for the best feast. Particularly in the bustling urban center of Dakar, Senegalese society is caught in the middle of so many influences: traditional African values and family structures, the legacy of French colonialism, the extremely powerful Islamic Mouride brotherhoods, the disordered modernization that comes with the desire for economic development, and the far-reaching effects of Western (especially American) media and materialism.

As the professor talked on about the loss of meaning in the commercialized holiday, I couldn’t help drawing comparisons with the religiously-rooted Christmas season in the United States. Instead of “khar ak khaliss” contests, we have enter-to-win promotions from car dealerships and turkey sellers. As the world gallops into the heart of this millennium, some might say that all sanctity is threatened by the monster of material culture.

Despite my distaste for the vast commercialization that I witness both in America and Senegal, I am not one of those doomsayers. My host family’s Tabaski celebration actually showed me that real meaning is still entrenched in the rituals, both modern and ancient, of this holiday. As my host brothers held down the legs of our poor little lamb and my host dad brought the knife to its throat, uttering bismillah (“in the name of God”), I was overcome by the significance of this act for Muslims around the world. Many centuries after Abraham’s sacrifice, my Senegalese family was showing their devotion to God in a very tangible way. They used the day as an opportunity to ask forgiveness of their loved ones for their transgressions, and they cooked extra platters of roast mutton to share with their Catholic neighbors—who will apparently return the generosity on Christmas, a tradition that underscores the ease of interreligious peace in Senegal.

As we stood on our terrace after dropping off these neighborly gifts, my twelve-year-old host brother Mohamed turned to me and explained why we shouldn’t feel badly about killing the sheep. “Every mouton prays to die on Tabaski, because they are guaranteed to go to Paradise.” Mohamed’s earnest comment reminded me that Tabaski is all about faith. Like most holidays in most cultures, it has become dressed with a material and commercial context. Faith and consumerism coexist, and this fact is authentic to the here and now of Senegal’s reality—what seems like contradiction is not contradictory for the people who live it.