Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Home: Hari Raya Haji / Korban - Timid Edition

Today's marks an occassion when our Muslim friends celebrate the conclusion of the annual Haj - the pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca. Thanksgiving prayers are offered in the mosques. Sheep were sacrificed (korban) whose meat was distributed among the relatives and the poor. As for myself, I get a day of Public Holiday :)

Korban (religious sacrifice) were perform in various Mosques around Singapore. Watching the Korban wasn't actually on my mind, but since I coincidentally drive past a mosque, I might as well take a peek. And don't worry too much about, I assure you that mine is a less bloody version of Korban :D


Beautiful Mosque


The Main Hall and this area is strictly out-of-bound to women.


Did I mentioned that it's raining? It been like these for several days now :(
That's the area whereby sheep were slaughtered. It's covered up due to the rain, you seeing it now because they already packing up :P Ideally, the slaughtering should be performed by the person offering the korban, however, butchers were mostly employed nowadays to perform this task (i.e slitting the neck, blood draining & finally cutting & twisting its head off)


The headless sheep were move to the next area whereby skinning & gutting were done.


Then it's onto the trolley and off to the next section


Here, sheep were cut to halves or quarters.


Then it's off to another section where they were electric saw to smaller pieces.


And finally, to even smaller pieces for packaging.


These people were waiting for to collect small part of their offering. The rest of the offering will be distributed to the more needy.


Collecting part of offering when their name is called.


(Needy)People lining up for distribution of offering. Well, they don't exactly looks like "needy" people, but that's the spirit of sharing their offering with others.

So you see, virtually no blood. Perhaps I'll do a bloodier version next year, but that requires some planning. Till then, I wish our Muslim friends ...
!!!SELAMAT HARI RAJA HAJI !!!

4 Comments:

Blogger pfong said...

Your series of shots documents the whole experience well. Thanks for sharing this.

8:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I really like this photo story, the butchery operation looks very well planned and neat.

11:17 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...

thanks for putting this thru', I would never have seen this otherwise (being woman and prohibited from entering the mosque) :)

11:23 AM  
Blogger slurp! said...

hiya,
Glad you all like them.

umami,
yes, this is one of the more organized operation, but then probably because it's on a smaller scale.

cath,
I believe women could enter the mosques, just don't step into the wrong places (e.g Main Hall). Ask when in doubt.

12:48 AM  

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