This weekend, while most Americans may not even notice, over 2 billion Muslims around the world are celebrating one of the two major religious festivals of the year: Eid al-Adha, or the “Feast of Sacrifice.” It is a three-to-four-day event that marks an official holiday in most Muslim-majority countries. It also aligns with the culmination of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, performed by around 2 million visitors every year to Saudi Arabia.

The feast, which begins on the 10th day of Dhu al-Hijjah, the 12th month of the Islamic lunar calendar, typically starts with morning prayers in a mosque, followed by families getting together. Children receive gifts, such as new clothes and shoes—something they may have waited for all year, as I recall from my own childhood. Meanwhile, men of the house take care of the ritual from which the very name of the festival comes: the sacrifice of an animal—such as sheep, goats, or cows—following specific Islamic guidelines. The meat is divided into three parts: one for the family, one for relatives and friends, and one for the poor, emphasizing charity and community.

The very act of sacrifice, slaughtering an animal, can be controversial—and there is indeed a movement to ban any such ritual slaughter in Europe and in the U.K., which has alarmed both Jews and Muslims, whose kosher and halal meat traditions are very similar. In response to those who advocate a ban, one could at least say that both traditions have rules that minimize animal suffering. In Islam, the Prophet Muhammad commanded, “Spare suffering to the animal you slaughter,” and jurists developed procedures: The animal must be handled gently, it should not see others slaughtered before itself, the cut should be immediate, the pain minimal.

So if ritual sacrifice is a part of the Islamic tradition, just like the Judaic one, some may still wonder why it is also the central theme of a major Islamic festival.

The answer, as explicitly affirmed in Islamic sources, is found in an ancient religious narrative: the story of Abraham receiving a divine command to sacrifice his son, only to sacrifice a lamb instead, miraculously provided at the last moment by the merciful God.

This story is biblical, as most Jews and Christians would immediately recognize. It is also quranic, as the Islamic scripture often retells biblical stories, sometimes with subtle nuances but still conveying similar messages. Among these are the stories of Abraham, who is praised in the Islamic tradition as Khalil-Allah, or “the friend of God,” and the pioneering monotheist that all believers—Jewish, Christian, or Muslim—should emulate. The Quran, in fact, presents itself as the rebirth of Abrahamic monotheism in pagan Arabia, bringing idolatrous Arabs back to the “God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac” that their Jewish cousins had always worshipped. (Q 2:133)

Regarding the sacrifice story, the Quran narrates a concise version of it in its chapter 37, “As-Saffat.” Here Abraham first prays to God for a righteous heir and soon gets the “tidings of a gentle son.” But then a drama unfolds:

When the boy was old enough to work with his father, Abraham said, “My son, I have seen myself sacrificing you in a dream. What do you think?” He said, “Father, do as you are commanded and, God willing, you will find me steadfast.”

When they had both submitted to God, and he had laid his son down on the side of his face, We called out to him, “Abraham, you have fulfilled the dream.” This is how We reward those who do good; it was a test to prove.

We ransomed his son with a momentous sacrifice, and We let him be praised by succeeding generations: “Peace be upon Abraham!” (Q 37: 102–109)

So, those “succeeding generations” include today’s Muslims, who remember Abraham, his son, and their ordeal, by emulating them literally, every year, in the Feast of Sacrifice.

Who was that son, exactly? Interestingly, the Quran never names him. That is why some early Muslim commentators, influenced by the biblical tradition—which Muslims embraced as Israilliyat, or “of the Israelites”—identified the son as Isaac. However, a later and eventually dominant interpretation in Islamic exegesis came to identify the son as Ishmael. It is a shift that seems to align with the broader historical narrative in which Jews trace their lineage to Isaac, while Arabs traditionally see themselves as descendants of Ishmael. So, giving the latter the central role in this story may have made sense to Muslim exegetes.

Meanwhile, there is an ethical challenge presented by this story to both Jews and Muslims, as well as Christians, all of whom honor Abraham. It is, flatly speaking, a chilling account of a father deciding to kill his beloved son with his bare hands. If something like this happened anywhere in the world today, we would consider it an act of insane savagery, if not pure evil. So, how can we make sense of the fact that it was attempted by none other than a great prophet, following a divine command, and worthy of praise in the scriptures?

This has been a daunting question for theologians from all three Abrahamic traditions. The most common explanation is that God, of course, would never allow the slaughter of an innocent child—He just wanted to test Abraham’s faith. Abraham, for his part, would of course never hurt his beloved child—but he put his faith in God, and hoped that there must be something good at the end. Some theologians—such as Jewish studies scholar Jon D. Levenson, as he argued in his 1993 book, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son—also suggest that the story was actually a symbolic rejection of the child sacrifice traditions that existed in some ancient Near Eastern cultures. Christians, meanwhile, have interpreted the sacrifice story as foreshadowing of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

While all these explanations may have merit, the sacrifice story still leaves us with an important question: Was Abraham’s blind obedience to a divine command, as chilling as it is, an exemplary act of piety?

For Søren Kierkegaard, the prominent Danish Christian theologian, the answer was yes. In his seminal 1843 book, Fear and Trembling, he portrayed Abraham’s obedience as the epitome of faith. Rational ethics would require disobedience, Kierkegaard noted, but Abraham opted for a “teleological suspension of the ethical.” This made him a hero of religion, a “knight of faith.”

However, for Immanuel Kant, the eminent philosopher of the German Enlightenment, there was nothing too admirable about such blind faith. In his influential 1793 work, Religion Within the Boundaries of Bare Reason, Kant referred to the sacrifice story only as a lesson against the dangers of blind obedience. Religious commandments should conform to universal ethical norms, he argued, or otherwise:

If something is represented as commanded by God in a direct manifestation of him yet is directly in conflict with morality, it cannot be a divine miracle despite every appearance of being one (e.g., if a father were ordered to kill his son who, so far as he knows, is totally innocent).

Kant arguably had a point, because “suspension of the ethical,” just to obey some higher authority, can lead to horrific results—both in religious and secular worldviews. In the religious ones, as Kant observed, it can create monsters like “the Grand Inquisitor,” and all kinds of religious zealots, who strive to “raze all unbelievers from the face of the earth.” In secular worldviews, as we have seen after Kant, blind obedience can create fascist, communist, or nationalist apparatchiks, who kill and torture to serve the great leader, the revolutionary party, or the glorious nation.

But is there a way to align the Kantian insight—the primacy of rational ethics over authoritative commands—with the story of Abraham’s sacrifice? At first glance, this seems challenging, as both the Bible and the Quran appear to commend Abraham’s obedience to a morally troubling divine command. Therefore, the story seems to affirm what philosophers call “divine command theory”—the view that divine commands create ethical norms, rather than conforming to them.

However, in the Islamic tradition, there is a little-known interpretation of the story that offers a different answer. It was first suggested by Mu’tazilites such as the early 11th century theologian Qadi Abd al-Jabbar, who are called the “rationalists” of Islamic theology, as they believed that ethical norms of “right” and “wrong” are inherent in the nature of things, rationally discoverable, and independent of divine revelation. This view led them to grapple with the sacrifice narrative, proposing an alternative interpretation that was later embraced by others, including the prominent Sufi scholar Ibn al-Arabi, some 200 years later.

This alternative interpretation rests on a remarkable detail of the quranic version of the sacrifice story quoted above. Here, unlike in the Bible, Abraham never receives an explicit commandment from God to slaughter his son. Instead, he only sees a dream in which he does that, which he interprets as a divine command. But was that really the right interpretation? “How could it be a command from Allah,” al-Jabbar asked, as “he could see anything in his dreams?” So, perhaps Abraham had just misinterpreted the dream’s lesson, but God rescued him from “Abraham’s misapprehension,” as Ibn al-Arabi wrote. Abraham was still praiseworthy for his sincerity, but God had never commanded the terrible act.

In other words, one could still praise Abraham and uphold ethical rationalism. One could be both Abrahamic and Kantian.

To be frank, such theological ruminations may not be on the mind of every believer who will be celebrating the Eid al-Adha this weekend. But they remind us of the richness and the complexity of the theological traditions built on the footsteps of Abraham.

His sacrifice story also reminds us how the three great religions that venerate him—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—are deeply connected. They are all truly Abrahamic creeds—with all the blessings, and the challenges, that come with the enduring legacy of that great man.