Yesterday was Feast of the Sacrifice, Ibrahim and Ismail, not Isaac [Ishāq in Arabic], the last day of the Hajj, every family slaughters a sheep and eats silly for four days, Cairo’s ovine population booms and busts overnight, no more Baas and Bleats, in the morning the poor go door to door begging for fleeces and intestines, I saw a few with entrails and skins draped on their shoulders like mink stoles and wooly capes.
-Letter Home, November 11, 1978
I remember going upstairs to talk to our neighbor just before Eid al-Adha and I found his apartment in a state of chaos and a sheep standing in the bathtub waiting for the sacrificial knife. Usually it was the toilets that were overloaded. Once a year it was the tub drains.