CHITRAL: As Eid ul Azha approaches marking the end of Haj pilgrimage, the main focus goes to securing animals to slaughter them on the sacred day. Muslims have started believing that mere slaughtering a sheep or a cow or a camel would be enough for them as to have performed a ritual which is not obligatory for ordinary people, but a Sunnat well known as Sunnat e Ibrahimi.

Even the clerics in their sermons preach the importance of the spirit of Hazrat Ibrahim (AS) as his bowing to the command of Allah to sacrifice his most precious belonging, which he readily did by putting his son to the knife, which Allah accepted and replaced his son Hazrat Ismail (AS) with a sheep under the knife.

We Muslims remember the sheep but not the spirit of sacrificing the most precious asset in the way of Allah. The sheep (or any animal) is not our precious asset these days. What we see precious today is greed, selfishness, over-worldliness, pride, prejudice and apathy. It is actually these ‘assets’ which need to be sacrificed.

Verily, Allah is not interested in the meat of the animal you slaughter. “Neither their meat nor their blood reaches Allah. Rather, it is your piety that reaches Him..(Al Quran 22:37)