[ RELIGION ]
Oahu Muslims host
holiday celebrationEid al-Adha festivities mark
the annual pilgrimage to Mecca
Oahu Muslims will gather at Kapiolani Park tomorrow to celebrate one of the two great holidays of their religion.
The Eid al-Adha festivities will begin with communal morning prayer and continue all day with a picnic and games for the children.
The holiday which translates as "sacrifice feast," memorializes a scriptural story that tells of God's early relationship with mankind and is familiar to Jews and Christians as well as Muslims. God required that Abraham offer his son as a sacrifice but when Abraham prepared to comply, God rewarded his faithfulness and spared the son. The Islamic belief is that it was Ishmael, son of the Arab woman Hagar, who was spared, while the other religions hold that the story refers to Isaac, the son of Abraham's Hebrew wife Sarah.
Eid al-Adha is celebrated at the time of the annual pilgrimage to Islam's holiest site at Mecca in Saudi Arabia. This week more than 2 million pilgrims from around the world are visiting the Kaaba, a cube-shaped shrine marking the site of Abraham's altar. When Muslims kneel in prayer anywhere in the world, they face toward the Kaaba.
The traditional pilgrimage ritual also includes the sacrifice of a lamb or other animal, as Abraham did after his son was spared. The meat is cooked to feed the millions of pilgrims.
One of the five basic practices, or pillars of Islam, requires that Muslims make the hajj to Mecca once during their lifetime.
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