Meanings of Animal Sacrifice during Eid-ul-Adha: Relationships with Religious Orientations and Muslim Experiential Religiousness in Pakistan

This investigation examined Pakistani Muslim understandings of the animal sacrifice that occurs during Eid-ul-Adha at the end of the Hajj. Pakistani university students (N = 156) responded to a number of items expressing possible interpretations of this ritual. A Faithful Sacrifice factor operationalized sincere religious reasons for the sacrifice and correlated positively with an Intrinsic Religious Orientation and with Muslim Experiential Religiousness. Extrinsic and Troublesome Sacrifice factors recorded nonreligious implications of the practice and displayed direct associations with the Extrinsic Social Religious Orientation and inverse linkages with Muslim Experiential Religiousness. Extrinsic Sacrifice also correlated negatively with the Intrinsic Orientation. These results further documented the complexity of Muslim beliefs and practices and once again illustrated how a dialectic between tradition-specific and more general social scientific perspectives can promote progress in the psychology of religion.