As Bangladesh prepares to observe Eid-ul-Azha this week - with the government having declared a seven-day holiday from 25 to 31 May 2026 - the country is in the grip of a familiar, feverish energy. The cattle markets of Dhaka, set up under the watch of the two city corporations, have been filling since the final week of May with traders arriving from Faridpur, Kushtia, Sirajganj, and dozens of other districts, their trucks laden with cows and goats that will soon become the centrepiece of one of Islam's most profound rituals. The smell of livestock, the haggling, the mobile banking pings as transactions are confirmed over bKash and Nagad, the knife-sharpeners setting up their grinding wheels on street corners - it is an annual theatre unique to this country, both deeply spiritual and furiously commercial. And it is precisely this tension between the sacred and the economic, between the universal and the unequal, that makes Eid-ul-Azha so worthy of serious reflection.
Eid-ul-Azha, observed on the 10th of DhulHijjah - falling this year around 27-28 May - commemorates one of the founding moments of monotheistic faith: the willingness of the Prophet Ibrahim to sacrifice his son in obedience to the divine command, and the divine mercy that substituted a ram in the son's place. The act encoded in Qurbani - the ritual slaughter of an animal, whose meat is divided equally among family, neighbours, and the poor - is therefore not merely a rite of devotion. It is a deliberate enactment of redistribution, an annual reminder that abundance must be shared, that the community is only as whole as its least nourished member. The theological injunction is explicit: one third for the family, one third for relatives and friends, one third for those in need. It is, in this sense, one of the oldest practised forms of social welfare in the world.
Eid-ul-Azha also arrives this year in lockstep with the conclusion of Hajj - the pilgrimage that is among Islam's five pillars. Bangladesh holds a quota of approximately 78,500 pilgrims for 2026, a figure that itself tells a story: it represents a significant cut from the previous year's allocation of over 127,000, following years of the country failing to fill its quota. In 2024, only around 85,000 Bangladeshis performed Hajj against a quota of more than 127,000, largely because of high inflation and the rising cost of packages - a minimum of roughly Tk 690,000 under government arrangements. The pilgrimage, like Qurbani, has quietly become a marker of who can afford to practise faith in its fullest institutional form.
To speak of Eid-ul-Azha in Bangladesh without speaking of money is to miss its most consequential dimension. Economists estimate that the festival generates economic activity worth around Tk 100,000 crore annually, making it one of the country's most powerful seasonal economic drivers. This is not merely consumption - it is a domestic value chain that begins in the rural farmyard and ends at the tannery gate, passing through livestock transport, animal feed, veterinary services, cold storage, digital payment platforms, and the informal trade of knives and cleavers.
At its rural heart, the Qurbani economy functions as the primary income event of the year for millions of smallholder farmers. Families who have spent twelve months raising a single cow - at monthly rearing costs that have risen sharply, from Tk 12,000 to Tk 15,000 per animal according to farmer reports - depend almost entirely on the Eid sale to realise that investment. For them, the festival is not a celebration that requires money; it is the occasion that produces it. The sale of a well-fattened cow can determine whether a family repays a microloan, sends a child to school the following term, or undertakes a household repair postponed through the monsoon. In 2024, the Department of Livestock Services reported that over 10.4 million animals were sacrificed nationwide, with a total supply of nearly 13 million animals stocked for the season across the country. Dhaka division alone accounted for over 2.5 million sacrifices.
Yet even this scale of rural economic participation is under pressure. Cattle market observations heading into 2026 show prices running approximately 30 per cent higher than the previous year, driven by increased feed costs, logistical strain, and residual inflationary effects on the broader economy. The digital cattle marketplace has grown substantially - data from platforms like Bikroy showed in 2025 that the majority of online livestock listings fell within the Tk 50,000 to 2.5 lakh range, catering to middle-income buyers - but rising prices are pushing many towards collective sacrifice arrangements or smaller animals, placing individual Qurbani beyond the reach of a growing number of households. The mobile financial services ecosystem has kept pace: Bangladesh Bank data showed monthly mobile financial service transactions reaching around Tk 171,664 crore at the start of 2025, with Eid seasons generating significant spikes that serve as an informal measure of the economy's festive pulse.
Nowhere does Eid-ul-Azha's economic potential and institutional failure converge more vividly than in the leather sector. Each year, roughly 50 to 60 per cent of Bangladesh's annual rawhide supply is collected in the three days of Eid - a staggering concentration of raw material that should make the country's leather industry among the most self-sufficient in the world. Nearly a million people are involved across the value chain, from rawhide collectors to finished goods manufacturers. With proper management, exporters believe annual leather shipments could reach five billion dollars by 2030.
Yet the sector remains mired in dysfunction. When the tanneries were relocated from Hazaribagh to Savar in 2017, the move was heralded as an environmental transformation. Instead, untreated waste continues to flow into the Dhaleshwari River, contaminating water and soil, and costing the industry access to premium global markets. Internationally, certification from the Leather Working Group - the gatekeeper recognised by brands like Nike, Adidas, and Timberland - separates credible exporters from marginalised ones. Italy has 952 LWG-certified factories, India 334, Pakistan 62. Bangladesh has fewer than ten. The consequence is that local exporters are forced to sell semi-processed wet blue leather to China at discounts of up to 60 per cent. Thus at every Eid-ul-Azha, an enormous national resource is simultaneously generated and squandered. This is not a problem of supply. It is a problem of governance.
The deepest question Eid-ul-Azha poses is also the one most politely avoided in public discourse: who, exactly, is this festival for? The theological answer is universal - it is an obligation for every Muslim who meets the nisab threshold, the minimum wealth threshold that triggers Islamic duties. The practical answer in contemporary Bangladesh is more complicated. As animal prices rise faster than incomes, Qurbani is becoming stratified in ways that cut against its egalitarian spirit. The wealthy offer premium cattle, displayed and photographed for social media, their value sometimes exceeding several lakh taka; the middle class increasingly turns to shared sacrifices or online platforms; the poor receive the distributed meat but cannot themselves participate in the act of sacrifice. The festival, at its outer edges, risks being transformed from an expression of universal obligation into a performance of economic status.
This is not a theological crisis - Islamic jurisprudence has always accommodated the reality that not everyone can afford Qurbani. But it is a social one. The meat distribution mechanism, when it functions well, is one of the most efficient channels of protein redistribution available to low-income Bangladeshi households, particularly in urban slums and rural areas where food insecurity remains persistent. When it functions poorly - when the hides rot uncollected, when waste management collapses in city streets, when the logistical capacity of a 17-million-person city is overwhelmed within 24 hours - the promise of redistribution curdles into a public health problem. Dhaka's post-Eid sanitation challenge is not new, but it remains unresolved, a testament to the gap between the scale of the festival and the ambition of its urban management.
Eid-ul-Azha arrives this year in a Bangladesh that is navigating the pressures of inflation simultaneously, a restructured export economy, political transition, and a public that, in various ways, is hungry for stability, for relief. The festival offers something that no policy document can replicate: a shared moral grammar, a collective act that insists, once a year, that sacrifice has meaning and that its fruits belong to everyone.
The challenge is whether that grammar can be extended beyond the three days of Eid. The leather industry needs a functioning effluent treatment plant and an honest reckoning with compliance, not as a technicality but as a prerequisite for the export earnings that working Bangladeshis deserve. The cattle economy needs investment in cold-chain infrastructure and veterinary services that protect smallholder farmers year-round, not only when buyers arrive from Dhaka. The Qurbani distribution system needs better coordination so that meat reaches those who need it most, and so that urban streets are not left in the condition of abattoirs for days afterwards.
Ibrahim's act, as the Quran recounts it, was not completed mechanically. It was completed consciously, with full awareness of what was being offered and what was at stake. The ritual that descends from it asks the same of us: not merely that we go through the motions of sacrifice, but that we attend to what we are actually doing, who benefits, and what obligations we carry beyond the morning of Eid. A society that can mobilise ten million sacrifices in a single day and still fail to certify ten tanneries is not short of capacity. It is short of will.
Dr Matiur Rahman is a researcher and development professional.
matiurrahman588@gmail.com
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