Each year the Eid asks of the believer a sacrifice, and a sacrifice is the surrender of a thing one holds dear for nothing in return. The believer gives the animal, gives its price, and gives the labor of the rite, and receives in exchange no profit a market would record. In the years before Moroccans were instructed to abstain from the sacrifice in 2025, the conditions that make this surrender possible had already died: across the consecutive years of drought the national herd had contracted, the pastures had dried, and the purchasing power of ordinary families had eroded to the point where the surrender of the price meant the ruin of the household. The instruction to abstain named a condition that already existed in the years before it, that the Eid had stopped taking place long before any authority announced it.
When the nation set aside the knife for one year, it performed the only true sacrifice the season has lately known. To renounce the rite in a year of scarcity surrenders the thing one holds most dear and receives nothing in return, which is the exact form of the sacrifice: pure loss, consented loss, loss that buys the believer nothing. In the year of abstention the entire nation surrendered the sacrifice together and gained nothing by the surrender, and in that shared loss the people stood as one, joined in the single act of giving up that the rite has always demanded and the market has always refused.
After the rains returned and the herd recovered to the abundance the Agriculture Ministry described, the government announced that the Eid would take place under normal conditions. The return it promised restores the rite and abolishes the sacrifice within it: a rite performed without loss, a rite in which the animal changes hands and the money circulates and no party gives up a thing it values. The government promised to restore the Eid. The government restored the image of the Eid, which is the spectacle of a sacrifice in which nobody sacrifices.
In the days before the morning of the slaughter, the Eid took place in a form that required no animal and no loss: in the livestock counts the ministry published, in the price deliberations the Competition Council conducted, and in the daily reports the press devoted to the cost of a single sheep. By the morning of the slaughter the Eid had been administered into existence through statistics, communiqués, and commentary.
Because a rite of loss can take place only where some party consents to a loss, the failure of the Eid follows from the refusal of every party to consent to one. The intermediaries practice the inverse of sacrifice: the men the markets call chena9a raise no flock, tend no pasture, and carry no risk, and they insert themselves into the passage between the field and the family to convert the rite of loss into a source of gain. The government refuses the loss its office requires: when the Competition Council declined to cap the price of the sacrifice, the state declined to sacrifice the doctrine of the free market, and it guarded that doctrine over the families it had promised to defend. The state can announce the Eid, can count the herd, can subsidize and supply and verify. The state will not surrender the one thing the rite asks of it, which is the loss of binding the price against the appetite of the men who set it.
For the family that walks the souks and sees in the price of every animal a figure its income cannot meet, the season reserves the only real loss it has not abolished, which is the ruin of the household. The rite asks the family to surrender what it values for nothing in return. The season asks the family to surrender what it cannot spare and still survive. By the morning of the Eid the family that will not accept ruin turns toward home without the animal, and the loss it declines to bear is the loss the intermediaries manufactured and the government refused to prevent.
Given that a sacrifice can take place only where a party consents to a loss, and given that no party in the season consents to one, the Eid of 2026 will not take place. What will take place on the morning of the Eid is the enrichment of the intermediaries who refused the loss, the impunity of the government that refused the loss, and the slaughter of the animal by the families pressed toward a loss they cannot bear. The enrichment will occur. The impunity will occur. The slaughter will occur. The sacrifice, understood as the surrender of a thing one holds dear for nothing in return, will not occur, because the season was built so that everyone might keep the rite and no one might suffer the loss the rite was made to demand.