This weekend Muslims around the world celebrated Eid Al-Adha, also known as the Festival of Sacrifice. Over the years my relationship to this holiday has grown deeper and my understanding of the story that inspires it has blossomed. But it’s a challenging one, one that required a lot of working through before something finally clicked. This essay is an attempt to share what I’ve learned from Eid Al-Adha with a broader audience. Many hearts are troubled these days and looking for sources of courage. I hope to walk you through my understanding of the Eid Al-Adha story and tie it to our present moment in the world. For Muslims, I hope it enlivens your connection to this tradition. For everyone, I hope you take some inspiration, and that you feel more connected to the stories and people in your life who help you face the biggest, hardest questions. This whole essay series, this whole Inshallah & The Creek Don’t Rise project, it’s all about the power of story. And the reality that many communities are facing crises at the same time. And that we need to tell our stories. And that we need each other. Today, we’ll touch on all of these themes through the story of Eid Al-Adha. First, let me tell you about Eid Al-Adha and how my understanding of it has evolved. For some of you, talking about the Quran may be familiar, for others of you, this may be a very strange, new experience. Thanks for diving in. Just remember, every culture has its stories, and every culture can get stuck within its own stories. But some storytellers are able to breathe new life into a story and help their people grow and heal. That’s what we’re trying to do here, inshallah. For those who are unfamiliar, Eid Al-Adha revolves around a story that is shared in both the Quran and the Old Testament: the Prophet Ibrahim, or Abraham, has a vision that he is commanded to sacrifice his son. In the Quranic version of the story, Ibrahim tells his son about the vision and the son submits willingly to the sacrifice. But God intervenes, provides a ram to sacrifice instead, and blesses them both for their virtue. For Muslims, Eid Al-Adha tends to be a somber, serious festival that celebrates the willingness to sacrifice and unshakeable faith. If this story about Ibrahim and his son causes some discomfort, you’re not alone. It raises a lot of hard questions: “What kind of faith would reward the willingness to commit human sacrifice for no apparent reason?” or “What kind of parent is praised as being virtuous because he became convinced God wants him to murder his child?” Plenty of Muslims ask these questions as well. It’s one of these really, really, really old stories that is hard to grapple with in the modern day, in no small part because of how much damage has been done by religion and people with religious power. Celebrating the idea of religious obedience can get real dicey. But that’s not the only way to understand the story. My first breakthrough about the Eid Al-Adha story came from my experience facilitating the Quran Study at Masjid Al-Rabia from 2018-2020. Masjid Al-Rabia was an Islamic community center in Chicago focused on the needs of marginalized Muslims. Many people who came to Masjid Al-Rabia had been abused in the past and had religion used to justify this abuse. Many came to our Quran Study hoping to work through that trauma and rebuild a relationship to their identity and faith tradition, whether that meant becoming a practicing Muslim again, or simply having a new appreciation for the beauty of their identity, free from the control of their former abusers, free to heal as they chose. The Eid Al-Adha story was always a tricky one. Many people who had experienced abuse being justified by religion found this story troubling and alienating. If the takeaway message of this story is obedience to the point of self-sacrifice, or obedience to the point of committing murder, that sounds a whole lot like real abuse that real people have suffered. In working through this story at Masjid Al-Rabia, I started to really zoom in on the fact that both Ibrahim and his son are described in the Quran as being gentle-hearted. The story begins with Ibrahim having a vision that he kills his son, but to me this sounds more like a nightmare. And Ibrahim, the gentle-hearted man, shares this nightmare with his son and asks what he thinks - “What do you see?” Ibrahim asks (37:102). The gentle-hearted son responds that he believes his father should do as he is commanded and says, “You will find me, God willing, among those who are patient” (37:102). But God intervenes and provides a ram to sacrifice instead. Something about the detail of these people being gentle-hearted cracked the whole story open for me in a new way. I was touched by imagining this as an intimate conversation between a father and son who are close confidants. Ibrahim and his son began to feel so much more like ordinary people. I began to imagine this story as a tale about a very gentle-hearted and loving person having a nightmare about the worst thing that he could ever imagine: being asked to kill the son that he loves. And he confides in his son about what is probably the worst thing the son could ever imagine too - having violence done to him by the father who he loves. Then the father and the son grapple with this nightmare together, affirm their trust in God, and conclude that they would both do what was needed, if that’s what it came to. This is where I really started seeing this story more as a representation of a deeper truth rather than a literal model of what obedience should look like. What is this deeper meaning? For me, this became a story of two gentle-hearted people trying to remain steadfast even as their worst nightmare is coming true. And I also see that the Divine’s main role in this story is intervening and stopping the nightmare from occurring and blessing these two people for their pureness of heart in the face of the unfathomable. In our Quran Study at Masjid Al-Rabia, I think it was far easier to feel kinship to Ibrahim and his son when we thought of them as representing ordinary and kind-hearted people facing their worst nightmare together. Perhaps in the case of this story, the worst nightmare is having to kill one’s own son, or having violence done to you by a family member. But in our discussions we connected this story to a whole range of things, whatever any of us might consider to be our worst nightmare. And what we chose to take from the story was not that we should practice unquestioning obedience, but more that we should ask ourselves - how do good people respond when their worst nightmare is coming true, or the most ultimate sacrifice is asked of them? We began to see the story as an invitation to ponder - What happens when ordinary people are confronted with no other option? When the end of the road comes, what would we give of our life, our livelihood, our liberty, or our love? What would we sacrifice in a situation in which our worst nightmare was coming true? In our Quran study at Masjid Al-Rabia, we started to reclaim this story as being a call to pureness of heart in the face of the unfathomable, not a call to commit the unfathomable. We realized we did not have to see this story as, “You should be willing to kill your kid if you think God is telling you to,” or “You have to let your dad do whatever he wants to you if he tells you it’s what God wants.” Instead, we chose to let the story ask us: “How would you respond if your worst nightmare was coming true?” We were proof that the Eid story does not have to be a call for religious fanaticism, obedience to the death, and pointless suffering. We chose gentle-hearted, poignant, and intimate questions about ultimate sacrifice instead. This was the first breakthrough* I had about Eid Al-Adha while working at Masjid Al-Rabia. But I had another breakthrough recently, this past Ramadan, when I heard someone tell an extremely powerful story and thought to myself: “This is the real-life, present day version of the Eid story. This person’s story describes exactly what I’ve been trying to take away from the Eid story for years.” The person who I met, who I heard tell their story, was Marcellus Williams Jr., the son of Imam Khalifah Williams. Imam Khalifah Williams was wrongly executed in Missouri in September 2024. The campaign for his life to be spared garnered international attention. Even the prosecutor who had originally sought the death penalty fought for Imam Khalifah’s life to be spared. During Ramadan this year, I got to hear and meet Marcellus Williams Jr., his son. His son spoke about his father’s profound faith and unwavering bravery in the face of his fate. Imam Khalifah was a devout Muslim. His last words were, “All Praise Be to Allah in Every Situation.” He frequently made the traditional du’a (prayer), “If life is good for me, give me life. If death is good for me, give me death.” He gave advice to others on death row: “I’m not going to tell you it’s going to be okay, I’m going to tell you God carries you through all things.” He was a spiritual advisor to many, both inside and outside prison walls, and corresponded with hundreds of people. Close to his death, he wrote a poem about “The perplexing smiles of the children of Palestine,” and how the persistence of their smiles even in the face of genocide strengthened his faith. According to his son, he went to his death peacefully, even telling the prison guards, “Let’s go, let’s do this.” On the execution gurney, Imam Khalifah was dressed in a white robe and had his arms crossed over his chest, the position Muslims take for prayer. From the death chamber, he checked on his son repeatedly, asking if he was okay, asking if he needed to leave. His son stayed. In the case of the nightmare that this father and son faced, the roles were reversed. It was the son who
