Why Eid al-Adha matters: understanding Islam through everyday practice

Blog post by Wajihah Hamid, Macquarie University, Australia
 
Every year, Eid al-Adha is often introduced to the wider public as the Muslim ‘festival of sacrifice’. This description is not wrong, but it is too thin. It tells us what the day commemorates, but not what the day does: how it gathers families, moves food across households, renews bonds of obligation, and makes Islam visible not as an abstraction, but as a lived and ordinary practice.

Eid al-Adha marks the story of Prophet Ibrahim (Abraham), his family, and their willingness to submit to God. It is closely tied to Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Makkah, and to the memory of sacrifice, trust and obedience. For Muslims who are able to do so, Eid al-Adha is also marked by qurban or udhiyah, the ritual sacrifice of an animal. The meat is then distributed among family, neighbours and those in need. The Qur’an (22:37) teaches that it is not the meat or blood that reaches God, but piety and sincerity. This matters because qurban is not simply an act of ritual slaughter. It is an ethical practice of sharing.

On Eid morning, millions of Muslims around the world attend congregational prayers at local mosques, open fields, community halls and temporary prayer spaces. The morning is filled with takbir, greetings, embraces, visits to elders, gifts for children, food prepared in advance, and messages sent across families separated by migration and distance. The day before Eid, the Day of Arafah, is also widely understood by Muslims as a special time for supplication and nearness to God. A well-known hadith describes the best supplication as the supplication of the Day of Arafah. Eid al-Adha therefore sits within a larger sacred time: prayer, remembrance, charity, food and community.

Why does this matter to those who are not Muslim? Because Islam is too often encountered in public life through crisis. This everyday perspective matters because Muslim worship has too often entered public debate through fear, crisis and violence. The 2019 terrorist attack on Christchurch Masjidain killed 51 Muslim worshippers and became a global symbol of how anti-Muslim hatred can be directed at ordinary practices of prayer. Since then, mosques and Muslim worshippers have continued to face attacks and plots in different contexts: shootings and arson attempts were reported at French mosques in 2019, the attacker at the Al-Noor Islamic Centre in Norway was later jailed for murder and a terrorism offence, a California hate-crime case included an attempted mosque arson linked to the Poway synagogue shooting and authorities have disrupted planned mosque attacks in Singapore and Scotland. In May 2026, three men were killed at the Islamic Centre of San Diego while protecting children and worshippers, with the FBI investigating the attack as a hate crime. The point is not to reduce Islam to victimhood, but to ask why ordinary Muslim practices are still so poorly understood.
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Muslims are repeatedly made visible through the language of terrorism, security, borders, surveillance, women’s clothing, ‘integration’, or national loyalty. These are not neutral frames. They teach the public to approach Islam as a problem before they have encountered Muslims as neighbours, colleagues, students, carers, shopkeepers, parents or friends.

This is why ordinary Muslim practice matters. In an earlier piece for Discover Society, ‘Mosques: Understanding Islam through the Practices of Ordinary Muslims in the West’, I argued that Islam and Muslims in the West need to be understood beyond pathology and stigma, through the practices of everyday Muslim life. Drawing on my ethnographic research in Lakemba, Sydney, I showed how mosques are not simply buildings that appear in headlines during moments of panic. For ordinary Muslims, they are places of prayer, friendship, charity, greeting, memory and belonging. One participant, Latifa, described Eid as incomplete unless she prayed at Lakemba Mosque. What mattered to her was not spectacle, but the embodied act of standing with others, greeting friends, giving charity, and feeling anchored in place.

Eid al-Adha offers a similar lesson. To understand Eid only through the vocabulary of sacrifice is to miss the social life of the day. Qurban meat moves through social relations: from the person who arranges it, to the butcher, to the volunteer, to the neighbour, to relatives, to families for whom meat may be a rare luxury. The act of sharing food becomes a small infrastructure of care. It links worship with obligation, piety with distribution, and belief with the everyday ethics of looking after others.

For many Muslim migrants and minorities in Western societies, Eid also carries a particular emotional weight. It is a day when the absence of extended family, homelands and childhood memories can be felt sharply. Yet it is also a day when new forms of belonging are made. A mosque car park, a community hall, a suburban street, a halal butcher, or a shared meal after prayer can become the setting through which Muslims feel that they are not merely present in a country, but part of its everyday social life. Belonging is not only declared by citizenship documents; it is practised through repeated acts of worship, care, food and mutual recognition.

This perspective also challenges the way Islam has been flattened through the politics of the ‘war on terror’. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, justified through claims about weapons of mass destruction that were later found to have been presented with a certainty not justified by the intelligence, remains a stark reminder of what can happen when Muslim-majority lives and places are interpreted through suspicion rather than understanding. Public narratives matter. They can make some lives grievable and others disposable, some places familiar and others frightening.

Eid al-Adha invites another way of seeing. It asks us to notice Muslims not only when mosques are attacked, when headlines circulate, or when politicians speak about them, but when they pray, cook, share, visit, mourn, celebrate and care. It asks the broader public to understand Islam from the ground up: through everyday practices that sustain moral life.

To understand Eid al-Adha is therefore not simply to learn a fact about a religious holiday. It is to recognise a practice of community-making. It is to see Islam not as a distant ideology or a security problem, but as a lived tradition carried through ordinary bodies, ordinary meals, ordinary streets and ordinary acts of care. That everyday perspective is not a minor supplement to public understanding. It is where a more truthful understanding of Islam must begin.

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Dr Wajihah Hamid is a sociologist whose work examines Muslim belonging, everyday multiculture, media representation and the spatial stigmatisation of Lakemba in Sydney. Her doctoral research at Macquarie University examined how Muslims in Lakemba cultivate embodied and everyday forms of belonging through everyday practices, despite racialised media narratives. Her broader research interests include migration, Islamophobia, urban sociology, multiculturalism, media discourse and the politics of belonging. She is especially interested in how minoritised communities practise belonging through ordinary, sensory and communal life.

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Image credit: Author’s own.

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Read further in Identities:

Muslim women as ‘ambassadors’ of Islam: breaking stereotypes in everyday life   OPEN ACCESS

‘Is it a mosque?’ The Islamization of space explored through residents’ everyday ‘discursive assemblages’

Islam and faith in times of crisis: religious observance and Muslim communities in the pandemic   OPEN ACCESS