The Commercialisation of Eid

Eid has come and gone and as the dust settles, I am trying to reflect on the day gone by and find out exactly what has happened to Eid? I think we are suffering from an intellectual inferiority complex. How did it go from being one of spiritual upliftment to one of commercial value? Have we forgotten the spirit and the principle of what Eid stands for?

The reason why I say this is that over the last 3 weeks or so, I have been bombarded with emails about Qurbani from organisations that I have not even heard of, each offering me better deals than the other. It seems that they have taken the concept of ‘competing with each other for good things’ literally as they competed to out do each other in offering the best price to slaughter a cow / sheep / goat around the world.

Forget even the Islamic magazines, flyers, TV stations etc who have carried out live appeals for people’s Qurbani. It seems that the powers that be have been intent on ensuring that we are left with no doubt as to who is the best service provider. The last straw for me was receiving a text message from one organisation whom I have not heard about saying they were the most competitive. I don’t even know how they got my phone number and don’t get me started on the legality of unsolicited contacting. As if these organisations would understand that!!!

The issue is this: it has come down to a competition on price. Pure capitalism at its raw and most original!! ‘I am offering a better price for a cow or goat or sheep so that you can get a better reward in the hereafter’. Each price is competitive and if you were to examine, you could actually shop around for the best deal in town, sort of like buying a car.

The numbers of players have increased as everyone wants to get into the business of doing charity and offering people redemption. This trust or that foundation or that relief agency seem to be doing the same thing but at a lesser price. Unfortunately with the proliferation of these organisations, it doesn’t necessarily mean things are getting better or that poverty (as these organisations are seeking to do) is being alleviated.

The problem is that they all work in pretty much the same areas of the world and considering the time of the month, most of these areas will be Muslim. With the addition of the organisations, it doesn’t mean that a space is being created for discussion on vital issues of dealing with the non Muslims, so all these organisations concentrate on Muslims. The problem comes when they undercut each other to provide the best prices on cows and goats in Pakistan, or Bosnia etc. However what people do not realise is that there are couple of issues inherent with this:
• Most of the organisations based in the UK, do this type of work through their local contacts and partners in whichever country that they operate in. The point is that these organisations do not want to incur additional administration costs or staff costs, which is understandable, so they rely on ‘reliable’ local people to do their work for them in choosing the animals, slaughtering and distributing.
• Yet how is it possible that in one country alone, different agencies offer different prices for effectively the same commodity, so for example in Sri Lanka, there are different costs for the cattle but this is not the reality on the ground. Come on Sri Lanka is a small country and the variations in price is minimal.
• Most of the local organisations that work in these countries are quite sophisticated in operation. They know that most of the UK based organisations will rely on them totally for the selection and distribution of meat as well as the reporting, and hence this is where the gap in transparency comes through. The UK based organisation takes at face value what is reported from the ground.
• Often in countries where there are fewer reliable local Muslim partners, you find that they have access to some of the main UK based Muslim agencies, and so they end up taking all the ‘contracts’ for Qurban from them. It also helps if you have people from your country as well living in the UK so they can effectively ‘lobby’ the UK charities for their business. So for example after working in Sri Lanka, I know one organisation that does Qurban for at least 5 different Muslim organisations based in the UK. I have no doubts about the integrity and honesty of this said organisation, but after working in Muslim Aid in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, I have come across instances where organisations have taken a photograph of a distribution of meat taking place at one area and using photo shop have inserted the different logos of the different organisations that they were supposed to be working for. Quite sophisticated I would say.
• Often the same cow has been ‘sold’ to different organisations who think it belongs solely to them.
• With very little coordination on the ground, you will find people being duplicated in terms of receiving meat, so the same person will receive meat from three different organisations (who believe they are solely giving it to the individual) whilst others go free.
• Often there is some internal corruption as meat prices are inflated to the donor, or the families of the people working in the organisation also receive the donations. I came across one instance where the butcher was the brother of the person in charge of receiving the donation from the UK based organisation, the person who distributed (and got paid for this was the son) and so on. Hence there is a nice internal family flow of money.
• The most serious problem though is that for the amount of money that flows into a country for the cattle, there are not enough animals to sustain that. I had someone tell me that their organisation alone receives 10 crore rupees (roughly 10 million rupees) which means that, that itself should satisfy all the needs for cattle without taking into account the local consumption as well as the other organisations., But this brings into question how can all this money be flowing into a country just for the slaughter of animals on one day and how can there be some much animals for that to happen?

This is just for the uk? How about the rest? How about Saudi? How about the locals who also choose to slaughter cattle? We need to be more systematic and transparent in our way of working. The amount of money that is given and spent on this alone can alleviate poverty ten times over, yet are being ‘wasted’ on this.

These local organisations are not entirely to blame. They are responding to a market demand. The fault is also partly ours, because of our commercial approach to eid. We want instant satisfaction. We want to go on the website or call the phone and pledge to help the poor people, without actually appreciating or understanding the realities on the ground. Honestly should the poor need meat for a day or do they need something for the year to help them live a better life, like better health care, education and so on?

So as we remember the sacrifice of Abraham, perhaps it is better that we actually revisit our concepts of charity otherwise, we will just be deluding ourselves.