(Washington Post) It was the day before one of the biggest Muslim holidays of the year, and the Rababeh family was in a panic.
The family had ordered hundreds of sheep, goats and cows to slaughter for customers in observance of Eid al-Adha, a holiday that ran from Tuesday to Thursday commemorating the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail at God’s behest, and God’s ultimate decision to let Ibrahim slay a sheep instead.
But now the family was scrambling to avert a crisis. Local officials had declared a few days earlier that, this year, the Rababehs’ Lebanese Butchers Slaughterhouse would not be granted the special-event permit it was required to have to accommodate its hundreds of expected customers. And now the town had placed a police barricade out front to block customers from walking through the slaughterhouse doors.
