The Feast of Sacrifice is one of the two most important Islamic feasts. It relates to the story in the Qur’an according to which Abraham was willing to sacrifice his son Ismael at the request of God. But at the moment that Abraham was to sacrifice his son, God sent a sheep and allowed Abraham to sacrifice the sheep instead of the son.
I have always been puzzled by this story which I know of course already since my youth in the version of the story which can be found in the Old Testament (and where Isaac has the honour of taking the place of Ismael). But it is confusing (or not at all) that Islam gives this story such a central place. What are we actually celebrating ? That God is so good to save Ismael ? That Abraham, as the example for all true believers, was willing to sacrifice his son at the simple request of God ? Or the combination of both : that God is good for the ones who are fully submissive ? I suppose the last explanation is the most accurate. The core of Islam is blind submission to Allah. A horrible message for a humanist.
One could argue that the same message can be found in the Old Testament and thus in Christianity. They are completely wrong. Christianity is not based on the Old Testament but on the New Testament. And a key difference is exactly that in the Old Testament God asks Abraham to kill Isaac while in the New Testament God sacrifices his own son to save the human kind. Islam goes back to the logic of the Old Testament.
Given the essential concept of submission to Allah in Islamic belief, we can question if there even exists something as ethics in Islam. Or if it exists, ethics is reduced to the question of obedience versus non-obedience. For Islam the believer is obedient or not. There is however no room for “real” ethics ; there is no room for an individual that has to take an autonomous decision following an internal moral compass.
