Eid - Translation: Party Time

Ramadan is an Islamic holiday which occurs a month out of every year. During this time Muslim people will fast from sun up to sun down and the idea is to get some idea as to what it feels like to be too poor to be able to afford food or drinkable water on a regular basis. I myself tried it out and I have got to say, while not eating was not easy but it was manageable, not being able to drink water for the span of a hot Oman day was no walk in the park. Eid al-Fitr is the three-day celebration marking the end of this month of fasting and a return to normality.

     The start of Eid can be estimated within a 2 or 3-day range at any point in the year; however, one does not know the official start of Eid until the nights before it begins. It was the evening of Thursday, September 9^th when a chosen committee climbed some mountain to observe the moon to determine the beginning of Eid. I am not sure how it is determined but as it turned out Eid began that night. During this first night of Eid Ahmed, the head of the household went to a very poor area of town with a bag of food for everyone in the house to distribute to the poor as well as a percentage of his annual income. Back at the house the children of the neighborhood would go from house to house, like Halloween, and receive small amounts of money from each one.

     The first day of Eid, following the first night, consisted of waking up relatively early and going from house to house, of friends and family, eating, what I like to call, Ultra Breakfast. The food literally never stops getting offered to you. This coincides with the Muslim and Omani tradition of charity and good will. It is almost like a three day long Christmas. When Ultra Breakfast was over I was taken back to Ahmed’s uncle’s house where incidentally a classmate of mine lives. I listened to them play various Bob Marley and other Arabic songs that I was unfamiliar with on the drums and guitar until it was time for a nap and the father, Sa’ad, took me home. Omani men had to wake up even earlier then I did that day to pray and even on a normal day there is time for a nap around 3 or 4 o’clock. The rest of the day consisted of sleeping off the day’s eating and a light dinner and we all went to bed early to get ready for the next day’s events.

     The second day of Eid I woke up at 4:45 a.m. in order to accompany Ahmed for the early morning events. It is important to understand that in Oman everything is done with the family, so the first thing we did was pick up some of Ahmed’s brothers and then we drove to a vacant lot in the back allies of Muscat, where the bulls were being kept. Now as a country that is prone to feeling somewhat guilty about our meat eating habits, most of us Americans are not in the habit of watching the process of how our cows become our steaks. This is what I witnessed on the second morning of the Eid holiday.

     It started out with a handful of grown men roping a bull and taking it out of the stall where it was being kept. Then these grown men using the ropes and all their strength wrestled this animal to the ground. Finally a man came over and ended the beast by slitting its throat multiple times. The next hour and a half was filled with taking the bull apart piece by piece and let me tell you, nothing was spared. Even the skin/fur was used in order to make rugs and other such things.

     I got back to my house at around 815 and went to sleep while Ahmed and his brothers went back to the family house in order to begin cutting up the large chunks of meat into edible portions. The rest of us did not get to the family house, where lunch was taking place, until around noon and the mend were still in the TV room, called a Majlis, cutting up the meat. We ate a quick lunch and went home about an hour later, and then spent the rest of the day relaxing.

     The final day of Eid was the least eventful, but it was the day that we all got to eat the bull that I watched get cut up the day before. The family and I went back the Ahmed’s brothers’ home and we ate what is called the Shua. What that is, is the meat is rapped up in banana leaves held together by chicken wire as and rapped in foil and other such concealments and then buried and barbequed underground. I am not entirely sure the method in which it is cooked but it comes out extremely fatty and it served on a large plate of rice. The men ate in the Majlis and the women ate in another room, which is interesting from an American perspective, but looking at it from an Omani perspective it seemed the normal and proper way to go about a nice afternoon lunch.