ABSTRACT
Learning religion begins, then, in mastering the many ways to draw on God's revelations. Islamic history, too, is above all a history of revelation (tanzil). Islam was born against a background of polytheism, and the statement most often pronounced by a Muslim, called the confession of faith, begins with the dictum: "there is no other deity but God". For Muslims, speech is sacred and powerful because God made known his commandments by speaking them, and because Muslims can obey those commandments through various ways of speaking. Muhammad's authority in the early Muslim community came from his direct ties to God. Across the world, many Muslims sacrifice an animal on the Feast of Sacrifice, the Id al-Adha, which occurs on the 10th day of the last month of the Islamic calendar. In the 1980s, the anthropologist Abdellah Hammoudi studied sacrificial rituals in a village of Berber-speaking Muslims in southern Morocco, near Marrakech.
