Eid al-Adha

Riyadh determines the starting date for major Islamic holidays. The Islamic year is set by the lunar calendar, which can lead to confusion over when new months start. Islamic tradition holds that a new month starts with the sighting of the new moon. This seems simple enough on the surface, but any number of circumstances can stir up debate. What about when it’s overcast but we expected a full moon; do we wait? Today we can determine the precise times of the moon’s waxing and waning, so do you rely on these predictions or rely on the commandments of the past to literally “sight” the new moon before a new month can start? If you stand by the old proscriptions, what if it’s overcast in one area and not in another? Does the new month start a day later in one place than it does in another?

Bottom line, Yemen relies on the dates set by Riyadh, and one week before Eid al-Adha Riyadh decided that Eid would be starting one day earlier than expected. This sent the college scrambling since we would end up losing a couple more class days. We had an emergency meeting to figure out how to rearrange the schedule and we got it all settled after adding a few class days on some weekends.

While it was nice to begin break early, the break wasn’t all I thought it would be. Vacation for Eid began ten days after I arrived in Yemen and I did not have time to make travel plans (traveling is more complicated here. You can’t just buy a bus ticket and go somewhere. Traveling anywhere a certain distance outside of the greater Sana’a area requires permits that take a couple of days to process). No big, I thought, I’ll just hang out in Sana’a and get to know my new city. Mistake. Sana’a shuts down for nearly all of the two weeks that people take off for Eid, and for the four days surrounding the focal point of the holiday, literally nothing is open. (aside: when describing Christmas to someone here, they asked me how many days it lasted. That should give you some insight into how holidays are treated in Yemen.)

The city was a ghost town. Yemen has a population today of about two million, up from just 50,000 in the 1970s. It’s estimated that nearly one million people leave the city during the holiday to visit their family homes in the other areas around Yemen. I walked around Old Sana’a for three days straight before finally boring of it. It was a stark contrast from my visit the night before Eid, when the markets were crawling with people and merchants. The market winds through a maze of alleys and the feeling was at times claustrophobic. Now all the shopping stalls were closed, metal doors rolled down over their fronts and no sign remained to indicate the presence of the market’s usually vibrancy. The plazas of Tahrir Square, normally used as parking lots, were empty of standard vehicles. Instead, men rented four wheeler and pony rides to children.

Eid al-Adha commemorates Abraham’s obedience to God in agreeing to sacrifice his own son (Ismail, in the Islamic tradition). If you know your Bible stories (or Qur’an, or Torah) you’ll recall that Abraham passed God’s test of obedience, so God sent an angel to stop Abraham’s hand and provided a goat for the sacrifice instead. To celebrate, Muslims sacrifice a goat on this holiday and share the extra meat with neighbors and the needy. In another major tradition for this holiday, parents present new clothes to their children (similar to Easter in this regard).

I discovered that in addition to clothes, toy plastic guns are a popular gift for Yemeni boys. The empty streets of Old Sana’a became a giant urban stage for whatever is the Yemeni version of Cowboys vs. Indians. Small boys constantly ran by me, firing imaginary bullets at the enemy factions of other small boys.

I quickly tired of walking around a ghost town and not even half way through the break I ran out of things to do. I was almost relieved once work started again. So far the biggest experiential difference between life in Yemen and life in Egypt has been the inability to travel with ease. Egypt had a solid train system that ran everywhere. I can only dream about where I could go given a free week in Egypt. A train ride to Aswan perhaps? Three days in Alexandria? Maybe I would camp in the desert. Instead I was stuck in Sana’a. While I got to see some of its quiet charms, I wondered when my next opportunity to travel would be. I don’t get many weeks off work for free. I have eleven months remaining though, and there will be plenty of opportunities to see more of the country.