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By Root 325 0

in Mosul and when morning came, we were finished with the bombing and nobody talked about it. Iraq was becoming a country that swallowed its violence and pressed forward. We were becoming people who did the same. The world starts moving fast around you and you move fast through it, too. One minute slurs into the next; the room and space renew; faces replace one another. You always think you will never forget this one moment, the one you stand in now, but it’s not true. I’d forget everything by nightfall if I didn’t write the details down. The more chaos, the worse my handwriting, but at least it’s there. You snatch up crumbs as you go—a quote here, a bit of description there, moving through events, snorting the world up and swallowing it. At some point you think you have to stop being human or you can’t do it anymore, but then you realize that your writing is nothing but your cut and impressed places.

Day creaked up slowly over the hills, and the city lay swaddled in the gentle ache of sleeplessness. Eid had come at last and I wanted to write something about violence, about ritual, about blood sacrifice and Iraq.

You probably know the story of the sacrifice, the centerpiece of Eid al-Adha. Christians and Jews have it too, though slightly modified. This is the story of Ibrahim, the Old Testament’s patriarch Abraham. Although he is in his dotage, Ibrahim is finally a father to a beloved son, Ishmael. Just as the child is getting big enough to help with the chores, God puts Ibrahim through a test. He orders the father to slaughter his son, Ishmael. Poor, tortured Ibrahim. What can he do? The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Now the Lord wants the boy back. So Ibrahim informs Ishmael that it’s time to die. Ishmael accepts the news stoically, lies down, and offers his throat. Ibrahim holds the knife aloft. Just then, God shouts down from the sky. Hey, never mind! It’s okay. I just wanted to see if you’d do it. Look, I’m sending you a ram, kill that instead. The child lives, the ram dies, and Ibrahim is celebrated down the ages as the creator’s faithful servant.

The Old Testament has Isaac, not his brother Ishmael, nearly falling under Abraham’s knife. And unlike the Koranic Ishmael, Isaac does not know he’s about to die. He pipes up and reminds his father that they need an animal to sacrifice. Don’t worry about it, Abraham replies darkly, God will provide us with something.

It’s a hard story to love. Ibrahim, willing to obliterate his son to obey a voice from behind the clouds. A petulant God, subjecting his servants to loyalty tests. I meditated on Ibrahim in the Middle East and the more I thought about it, the less I liked the story and its suggestion that faith is enough to excuse the stain of violence. Ibrahim’s God abruptly demands bloodletting in contravention of his own laws. Maybe it won’t accomplish anything grand. Perhaps God would just like to see how far the faithful will follow. As for Ibrahim, he accepts on blind faith that the voice in the sky is not a dream or a hallucination, but marching orders from God himself. This, in fact, is his great virtue—that he doesn’t question or argue. This is the moral of the story. Let us proclaim the mystery of faith, the Catholics say. The trouble is that, centuries later, the Middle East is still packed with murderers who believe they are doing God’s will, privately attuned to the ring of God’s voice. This is still how Middle Eastern battles are fought, by Arabs, Israelis, and now by Americans, too. Blind faith is the footbridge that takes us from virtuous religion to self-righteous violence. That day was the crystallization, a celebration of capricious mercy and murder in the name of faith.

In modern Iraq, families who lost loved ones in Iraq’s many wars pour into graveyards to grieve at the tombs on Eid. Saddam Hussein would be hanged on Eid al-Adha in 2006, in an American-occupied Iraq, while Shiites taunted him. It just worked out that way, officials said.

The stringer arrived before dawn to take us to the cemetery. She had cotton-white skin and black robes,