Yesterday was the first day of Kurban Bayramı, which is more commonly known outside of Turkey as Eid al-Adha or the Feast of the Sacrifice. It lasts four days here, all of which are public holidays. I wrote about it last year here, here and here but is is an annual remembrance of Abraham's willingness to submit to God and sacrifice his son. It's typically celebrated by a family sacrificing an animal (in Turkey, usually a sheep or cow) on the morning of the first day. Traditionally, the meat from the animal is divided into three parts: one third is given to the poor; one third to friends, wider family and neighbours; and the remaining third is kept for their own family. In cities, the animal can be ordered already sacrificed and cut from a shop or supermarket, or a family can go to a special sacrifice abattoir place and choose their animal and have it sacrificed then and there.
This is our first full Kurban Bayramı actually living in this city - we arrived part way through last year. In the run up, we received a promotional leaflet advertising different options for buying the meat of a cow or sheep, or part of it, when our shopping was delivered last week and then saw the sudden appearance of signs on the street giving the location of the nearest sacrifice places. And then there was the almost mass emptying of the city the night before, as people returned to their family villages for the day.
As might be expected, it's also something that comes up with the local believers every year. We've had teaching that we have no need to sacrifice an animal every year, because our Sacrifice was once for all. We had very new believers at our weekly gathering yesterday who for the first time in their lives were not celebrating Kurban Bayramı but who were singing of the power of that Sacrifice two thousand years ago. We had almost all of the young, single believers missing from our weekly gathering yesterday because they would have been required to be with their families.
And we've had various discussions about the eating of sacrificed meat. All meat in Turkey is considered halal - meaning that it conforms to Islamic law in that the animal is killed in a certain way and that a blessing is said while the animal is slaughtered. Eating halal meat isn't an issue I've ever heard raised here - and actually, from our point of view, it's not something to particularly worry about. There's a good chance that people in the UK have unknowingly eaten halal meat anyway (source). But meat from animals that have been killed as the integral part of a Muslim religious festival is different and it does come up as an issue.
Some Turkish believers have chosen to very clearly make a stand on this issue and do not eat meat that has been sacrificed as part of Kurban Bayramı. We understand their thinking, particularly as they are usually first generation believers, with unbelieving family, and feel the need to draw a very clear line in the sand between the practices of those around them and their new practices as believers. We do not come from the same background as them and don't feel so close to the issue.
But we've also been talking about how this is not a new issue for believers but one that is directly addressed in God's Word, in particular Romans chapter 14. So in conversation, believers do explain the conclusions they've come to and why they think that way - but it is also stressed that this is an issue of conscience, where mature believers can come to different conclusions. Our main responsibility is to maintain the unity of the believers and not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in the way of fellow believers, but to deny our own preferences for the sake of our believing brothers and sisters.
So what has this practically looked like for us this year? It's meant respecting the convictions of our fellow believers and understanding that those from very different backgrounds to us experience Kurban Bayramı very differently from us. For L and I, it's also meant that when our neighbour rang our door bell earlier with a plastic bag full of meat for us, we accepted it graciously and thanked her. She will know that we are not Muslim, but to refuse her kind gift would have been incredibly rude and incomprehensible to her - she doesn't know anything about our beliefs so to refuse would just have offended her with no gain made whatsoever. However, if, for example, we had very close Turkish friends or family members who had made a sacrifice and we had the relationship with them, or the meat was offered in such a way that it would have been a stumbling block to a Turkish believer, we may have declined the meat with the explanation of why we don't celebrate Kurban Bayramı.
The caveat, as with all of these issues, is that we're still figuring out these things and I'm sure that our thinking will become deeper and more nuanced as we live here longer. Yet we can't just put off thinking about these things because we've only been here three years and not thirteen or thirty.
In the mean time, I now have a bag of meat in my freezer. I don't know what animal it's come from and have no idea what cut of meat it is, never mind what I'm going to do with it!
