A French mayor told Muslims they could no longer dump sheep carcasses into the town’s skips following Monday’s celebration of Eid-ul-Adha, the “festival of Sacrifice”.
The religious holiday, also known as the Greater Eid, is the second most holy festival in the Muslim calendar, and remembers the prophet Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his own son in the name of God.
Muslims celebrate by sacrificing a cow, a sheep, or a goat, and by sharing the meat with members of their family and close friends.
But Gérard Darmanin, the mayor of Tourcoing, a city located to the northeast of Lille, said that Muslims would have to find another way to dispose of the animals’ bodies, and warned that they should not actually be slaughtering them in their own homes.
“Dumping sheep carcasses into a skip is both illegal and unhygienic. The animals must be slaughtered in an approved abattoir,” said Mr Darmanin.
The Tourcoing mayor said that local binmen and other town hall employees had complained about the Muslim tradition, saying it was “not normal” and “unhygienic” for them to have to load bloodied, dead sheep into the back of trucks, which were initially designed to keep the town clean.
Prefecture officials sent out a press release in August reminding Muslims that anyone found guilty of “slaughtering an animal outside of a State-approved abattoir risked a €15,000 fine and a six-month prison sentence”.
The press release also listed four abattoirs in the region where Muslims could go and have their sheep slaughtered, and who would respect all Eid-ul-Adha sacrifice rituals.
But the local Muslim community says it “does not understand” why people are no longer allowed to dump the sheep’s bodies into local skips, seeing as the town hall has been letting them do so for more than a decade.
Muslims claim that up until now, local authorities had even provided them with special skips they could dump the slaughtered animals.
According to Abdelkader Aoussedj, the president of a Muslim association in the Nord-pas-de-Calais region, Mr Darmanin’s decision was “not well thought out” and his claims were “blown out of proportion”.
“He needs to provide [local Muslims with] a tangible alternative,” he said.
Abdelhalim Kedad, a member of a local mosque, said that the Tourcoing mayor has gotten rid of one problem, by creating a new one: “If Muslims are no longer allowed to throw a carcass in a skip after having celebrated Eid, they will end up dumping them into regular bins – and now that would be really unhygienic”.