Today is a special day for hundreds of thousands of Muslims in Belgium and hundreds of millions more across the world. This year Wednesday 28 June is the first day of Eid al-Adha, the Feast of Sacrifice. It is the second and the largest of the two feasts celebrated in the Islamic faith. The Feast of Sacrifice honours the willingness of Ibrahim to sacrifice one of his sons as an act of obedience to God’s command.
However, before Abraham could sacrifice his son in the name of God, God provided him with a lamb to sacrifice in his son's place. In commemoration of this, Muslims ritually sacrifice an animal, often a sheep. Some of the meat is consumed by the family of the person that had it slaughtered, while the rest is given to the poor and the needy.
The feast is a time for big family gatherings and sweets and gifts are exchanged. The feast last 4 days.
This year Palace 12 at Brussels Expo has been turned into a mosque during the Feast of Sacrifice. Thousands of people can pray inside the temporary mosque at the same time. Nevertheless, such was the number of people wishing to visit the mosque on Wednesday morning that many were forced to queue up outside.
The City of Brussels joined forces with several of the city’s mosques to convert the Palace 12 concert hall into a place of worship for the duration of the Feast of Sacrifice. Due to the large number of people wishing to visit the mosque some were unable to get inside to participate in morning prayers.
Zakaria Andi was one of the 10,000 people that were able to get inside. He told VRT News that “We would normally also slaughter a sheep ourselves, but that has been banned in Brussels so we will buy the meat at he abattoir. After prayers we will go and visit family and we will have breakfast together and we will eat the lamb”.