From Sacrifice (Qurban) to Self-Worship and Food Obsession

In Islam, man has been created exclusively to worship his Creator, the Almighty Allah, which means aligning all his spiritual, moral, and material actions with the authoritative Will and Word of Allah.

This paradigm liberates man, gives him a sense of belonging and worth, and sets him on a path to ultimate self-fulfillment. To accomplish this, a series of normative rituals and behavioral standards have been prescribed for man in his capacity as Allah's vicegerent on earth to remain focused and confidently stay the course.

One of these rituals and standards is animal sacrifice, known in Arabic as qurban or udhiyah (sacrificial animal).

The timeless significance and enduring role of the institution of sacrifice

The institution of sacrifice is as old as humankind itself and is closely tied to the concept and palpable reality of Islam, which has also existed since the beginning of human life on earth. Islam, representing the definitive truth, is the only religion from Allah that has been revealed to all prophets and communities since humanity's dawn.

The truth about sacrifice is upported by the Qur'anic reference to the two children of the first Prophet and first man, Adam, who is the father of the human race (al-Ma'idah 27-31). They both offered their respective sacrifices to Allah. Commentators of the Qur'an tell us that one of them offered a ram, while the other offered some of his agricultural products.

However, as people rebelled against their Creator and themselves, they felt inclined to distort the heavenly guidance and pursue false alternatives. In this way, monotheism was transformed into polytheism, authentic faith into paganism, virtue into depravity, and finally, civilization into barbarism.

Over time, people began to worship literally anything in lieu of the true God, concocting various ceremonies, sacraments, and superstitions to somehow try to satisfy their innate instinct to worship.

Indeed, it is only through worship that a person can truly be himself and prevail over the endless trials of life. Without it, one is destined to degrade, fail, and eventually, in terms of his achievements and legacies, to perish. However, what is meant here is the authentic worship, not its false surrogates. The latter unmistakably reveals the inadequacies of its advocates and hastens their downfall.

The ritual that was distorted beyond recognition, serving the sham objectives of equally sham religions and ideologies, was sacrifice (qurban). Every religion, ideology, worldview and even philosophy advocated a form sacrifice to its deities, which could be either in heaven or on earth, and either in bodily, mental or spiritual terms.

Were it not for Islam as the final revelation or Testament to humankind, and Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him and his family) as the final Messenger of Allah, the true meaning and purpose of sacrifice, as given to Prophet Adam and then upheld by each and every subsequent Prophet, will never be known.

The meaning of sacrifice in Islam

In a nutshell, the importance of the Islamic sacrifice, or qurban, can be summarized as follows: it signifies an act of worship, submission, and obedience to the Creator, demonstrating that man does not confuse the realms of the Creator and creation, as well as lordship and servitude. It also teaches man to understand his place in relation to the rest of the created world and to appreciate his honorable position within its intricate web, where reciprocity is key.

Finally, it instills in people a sense of humility, dependency, and cooperation, which begin on earth but extend into the highest jurisdictions of the metaphysical kingdom.

Everything enjoys a noble purpose and status, which must be recognized and respected in practice. Man can be whatever he already is or wants to be in the future, but without both the biological and immaterial support of the other tiers of the created domain, he will be a nonentity. His dreams of self-actualization, empowerment, and growth will remain nothing but frustrated fantasies.

For that reason, when a family sacrifices an animal in the name of and for Allah, they distribute part of it among the poor, needy, neighbors, and relatives, while consuming the rest themselves. This affirms the three pivots of existence: revering Allah with genuine gratitude, acknowledging fellow beings as integral members of a global community, and honoring the natural environment.

If people could only embrace the Islamic concept of sacrifice, the issues surrounding sustainability, human progress, and social refinement would become significantly less complex and easier to attain than they currently are.

Some examples of sacrifice distortions

Today, there are essentially countless alternative meanings and expressions of sacrifice, reflecting the numerous historical distortions of Islam and its many Prophets, as well as the inner nature of each distortion.

For example, in Judaism, there was an ancient practice of sacrifice that involved various types. Some types required that animals be completely burned, while others specified that only certain parts be burned and others consumed by priests and eventually the offerers.

Sacrifice rituals were conducted only at the Tabernacle and later at the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, following the destruction of the Second Temple, the Jews rescinded the practice, as there was no place to make offerings. They replaced it with devotional acts such as prayer, fasting, and study of the Torah.

In Christianity, on the other hand, sacrifice is not practiced. Instead, it is believed that the same was fulfilled and ended with the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. That is why he is called the "Lamb of God." He chose to be sacrificed, suffering crucifixion at Calvary, or Golgotha, to save the world from its sins.

According to the New Testament, when John the Baptist saw Jesus coming towards him, he said: "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!" (John 1:29).

Also, since their inceptions, both Buddhism and Hinduism have profoundly valued a multifaceted hierarchy of offerings that included partly animals and predominantly foodstuff, which were reflective of their unique religious frameworks-one being non-theistic and the other polytheistic.

This intricate system encompassed not only deities, whether they exist in the earthly realm or beyond it, but also incorporated spirits and monks, thereby creating a rich tapestry of reverence and ritual that spans various dimensions of existence.

The rise of the modern man built upon the foundations of Greek and Roman heritage

Today, as the modern man has managed to undermine the functioning of all conventional religions around him, the entire landscape-religious, ideological, sociocultural, and civilizational-has changed beyond recognition. As one would expect, the concept and tangible reality of sacrifice have been affected as well.

This very man claims that he has abandoned the entire universe of religion that has betrayed and held him back for ages. Instead, he lives by his own self-sufficient means, enjoying freedom, dynamism, and prospects. He neither needs religion nor does religion need him. The feeling is mutual.

Needless to say, this sentiment exemplifies the culmination of a process that started with the ancient Greeks. The human intellect, tired of the degeneracies and retardations of religion (its misrepresentations), declared a war against it and opted to go solo to pursue wisdom and happiness as the holy grails of homo sapiens.

This is how philosophy emerged and how religion and independent intellectual pursuits were set on a collision course forever. The process was interrupted by the Christianization of the Roman Empire - or, more precisely, the Romanization of Christianity - when the Church's canons and its holy ecclesiastics were placed on a pedestal to rule the spiritual, intellectual, and physical sides of man.

After the doomed failure of the interregnum, which was later referred to as the Dark Ages, humanity turned inward, rebelling against any external authorities and points of reference, whether they were human or divine. It was at this point that reviving the ancient, sophisticated pagan legacies of the Greeks and Romans proved to be the best option.

Their humanism served as the ideal foundation for the humanism of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, which epitomized the soul and moral compass of everything later associated with the aspirations of the modern man.

Therefore, the modern man was not born from the post-Christian heritage but rather reborn in the neo-Greek and neo-Roman traditions, from which the term "Renaissance" derives its meaning of "rebirth," and "knowing solely based on reason and individualism" forms the essence of the Enlightenment.

Be that as it may, the modern man was right to rebel against the distortions of the truth and the resulting falsehoods, but he was wrong to do the same against religion itself. Little did he know that Islam remained the only truth, original and pristine as ever. He did not search deeply enough or properly, and his conclusions were rather premature.

The modern man should have freed himself from growing revulsions and prejudices to better see the options still available. It is hard to believe that for millennia, with or without religion, there was nothing but misguidance and falsehoods, and that humanity's entire civilizational journey was, at worst, a failure and, at best, anticlimactic. It was equally impossible for everything in life to make sense except for the combination of life and the revealed truth, a situation where, apparently, virtually nothing made sense or seemed repairable.

The modern man, as a consequence, coerced himself into developing a disease of religiophobia, allowing it to dominate his being and decision-making. As far as Islam is concerned-which has always existed but was viewed through the lenses of humanized religion and deified humanism-the disease of religiophobia merely morphed into the mutation of Islamophobia. It is no wonder that ignorance and antagonism became regular features in the modern Western man's dealings with Islam.

The self-worship (autolatry) of the modern man and his culture of sacrifice

It was not long before the modern Western man transformed his self-serving humanism into a new religion of self-worship or autolatry. Such was unavoidable because, as mentioned before, man is inherently driven to worship something and must submit to an authority, which he may consciously classify or subconsciously perceive as a deity or god. Without this, he cannot survive as a human being or function as himself.

Nobody can deny that man is a "deity" if he subsists as an absolutely free agent and the only source of authority and legitimacy, as well as the only ideological, ethical, and epistemological yardstick. His regulatory laws and moral guidelines then become a form of religion aimed at giving a sense of meaning and order to life. In this case, man himself connotes the source, implementer, overseer, and object, all at once, of his theoretical and applied existential patterns.

In point of fact, a god is something a person esteems the most and lives for, placing everything he has at its disposal. It is a force, material or otherwise, for which one dedicates his life and ultimately sacrifices everything. Self-worship, it follows, is to love and live for yourself more than anything else, making personal interests the highest good for which to commit life and accept mortality.

Even the Qur'an states that there are people who take their vain desires (hawa') as their god. As a result, Allah sends them astray, seals their hearing and hearts, and places a veil over their visions (al-Jathiyah 23).

Towards this end are the statements of some of the most prominent Western philosophers and scholars who were the driving forces behind the invention of this modern religion of autolatry. For instance, Jean-Paul Sartre said that man is nothing else but what he makes of himself. Sigmund Freud similarly claimed that human behavior is deeply driven by unconscious desires, especially sexual and aggressive instincts.

Of the same kind are the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, who stated that God is dead and that "we have killed him," meaning that religious beliefs and values were collapsing in modern Western society, replaced by the nihilistic and hedonistic values of modernism.

Immanuel Kant also noted, while defining the Enlightenment, that the latter signifies the emergence of man from his self-imposed nonage, which is the inability to use one's own understanding without external guidance, including religious influence.

Concurrent with the advent of the new anthropocentric religion, its rituals centered on hedonism, self-indulgence, and pleasure-seeking started to emerge as well. Those related to satisfying the insatiable demands of animalistic urges and bodily desires stand out.

Gluttony, or voracity, as the vice of eating to excess, is one of them. In the circumstances, materialism became the mainstream worldview, with the primary goal of civilization being physical comfort. This, in turn, led people to see food in a different light and to increase both the quantity and quality of food consumption, making this tendency a benchmark for corporeal well-being.

All of a sudden, life started revolving around food. Life was food, and food was life. Culinary secrets and skills became assured paths to fame and wealth. TV channels, educational programs, magazines, books, and many sectors of the entertainment and marketing industries were all dedicated to this new vogue. "Experts" never stopped talking, enlightening, instructing, and guiding about it. Food simply became on everyone's lips, in their minds, and, expectedly, in everyone's bodies.

Food became an obsession, nigh on a pandemic, and many people's lifestyles evolved into living to eat and eating to discover the hidden pleasures of life and find happiness. This obsession led to obesity becoming one of the main challenges for modern societies, significantly impacting national economies by reducing productivity and life expectancy while increasing disability and healthcare costs.

Whether the world was geocentric or heliocentric became irrelevant; what mattered was that it was, as everyone agreed, food-centric. Ironically, where there was more "civilization," there was more gluttony and, of course, more obesity. Obesity came to symbolize "prosperity" and "fine culture."

As part of his ethical philosophy, Socrates foresaw the problem and its potentially catastrophic consequences, so he warned: "Bad men live that they may eat and drink, whereas good men eat and drink that they may live."

Sacrificial offerings to the self

What was happening was deeper than it appeared. The fascination extended beyond simply eating and living to do so. The truth is that the modern man was gradually perfecting his new religion of self-worship. He was doing this subconsciously, unaware of the process, as his innate instincts for constant worship and total obedience had to be fulfilled.

Due to this subtlety, people may not easily come to terms with the new reality, contesting and repudiating it. Which is expected and normal, as seals have been placed over their hearts and ears, and veils over their eyes, as highlighted by Allah, who punishes the rebellious and wrongdoers in such a humiliating way.

Integral to the finalization of the new autolatrous religion was the idea of sacrifice, which had to be consistent with the new beliefs and values. Since the novel deity resided within man-yet was man himself-the sacrifice rituals also needed to be inward-looking, targeting the desirous "idols" and hungry "spirits" within each person. This was necessary to keep them content and prevent them from unleashing anger and aggression.

For this reason, a person's unhappiness, depression, and overall life ambitions are often related to food, and many military conflicts, both national and international, have been fought to gain access to scarce resources. Thus, the hidden driving force behind people's individual and collective agendas is the rapidly depleting resources, which ultimately end up on the tables and plates of the masses.

That said, the modern man does not eat; he devours food. This behavior is not a necessity but rather a habit and ritual. Meals become sacrifices to his selfish ego, which sees itself as an independent agent presiding over all of creation. He does not offer animals and foods to external gods or idols but to himself as the supreme being. The divinity he claims requires tenacious placation, a skill in which he truly excelled.

Hence, meals are transformed into sacraments, kitchens into altars, restaurants into temples, and chefs into omniscient gurus and priests.

What is also becoming increasingly prominent is culinary or food tourism, where people travel to nearby or distant places to explore and experience new foods, attend food festivals, carnivals, and celebrations, and exchange views with fellow enthusiasts.

Nonetheless, while this may seem like tourism on the surface, it is, in reality, a form of pilgrimage to sacred food locations, visiting food shrines, performing significant food rites, and meeting esteemed food ecclesiastics.

Consequently, food is not only consumed but also held as an insignia, acting as a source of inspiration and a sign of belonging. Just looking at it, talking about it, thinking about it, or watching people prepare, cook, or enjoy it can make someone feel good. The rule is that the more food there is, the better, even if it is just for decorative or ceremonial purposes.

At the end of the day, even wasting or throwing it away is acceptable and does not undermine the purpose of worship. It shows that people are in charge of their destiny, charting their life path.

Food fights, chaotic events where food is thrown at others, often for fun and either occurring spontaneously or being organized during certain food festivals, are also enjoyable because they provide a feel-good factor and demonstrate that everything functions well along the latest gods-servants axis.

All this instills a sense of joy and confidence, as it is perceived that the religion of self-adulation has reached its apex-scientifically described as the end of history and the last man. This sense of religious fulfillment gives people a feeling of self-realization, turning them into devoted followers.

Paradoxically, while Westerners claim to have abandoned religion, they have created one for themselves, reflecting their turbulent history and immature vision for the future. They are so faithful and committed to it that followers of other religions cannot match their enthusiasm, making the West the most "consecrated" ecosystem and Westerners the most "religious" genus.