Beyond Devotion Eid al-Adha as a Civilizational Record of the Abolition of Human Sacrifice

This paper argues that Eid al-Adha, conventionally interpreted as an act of religious devotion, in fact records one of the most consequential moral transitions in human history: the formal nullification of institutionalized human sacrifice, a practice once embedded across nearly every major ancient civilization. Drawing on archaeology, comparative religion, and Quranic linguistics, the study situates the Abrahamic substitution narrative of Surah al-Saffat (Q. 37:99–111) within this broader civilizational framework rather than treating it as a matter of theology alone. It further advances an original grammatical analysis of the Quranic verb ara ("I see / I keep seeing"), arguing that its imperfect, present-continuous form carries implications for the nature and recurrence of the vision that have been largely overlooked in existing scholarship. Building on the jurisprudential classification of the udhiyah as sunnah mu'akkada and the Quranic emphasis on consciousness over ritual matter (Q. 22:37), the paper concludes that Eid al-Adha constitutes an invitation to moral remembrance belonging to the shared ethical heritage of humanity, rather than a financial obligation confined to Islamic law alone.