PRINCETON, N.C. — For six years, it has been a tradition for Muslims in the Research Triangle: After morning services on the first day of Eid al-Adha -- the "festival of sacrifice" -- scores of families leave the tweedy environs of Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and head toward an obscure plot of land on a two-lane country road.
They come to visit Eddie Rowe, a hog farmer.
The children typically run around among Rowe's loose chickens. The women prepare picnic sandwiches. And the patriarch of each family awaits his turn to slit the throat of a lamb or a goat that Rowe has sold him.
To Muslims around the world, this is an important ritual -- a tribute to Allah and to the prophet Abraham, who in both the Koran and the Bible is said to have offered his son as a sacrifice to God.
To research scientist Ahmed Mamai, 40, a native Moroccan, performing the sacrifice on Rowe's property allows him to maintain an ancient tradition that would be difficult to square with his lifestyle in suburban Raleigh. If he slaughtered an animal in his backyard, Mamai said with a smile, "My wife would sacrifice me."
But this year, things are not going as planned on Rowe's farm.
Last week, the North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services obtained a restraining order alleging that Rowe was operating an unsanitary and illegal slaughter facility.
And so on Wednesday, the first day of the three-day festival, confusion reigned in place of celebration. Throughout the day, minivans and sedans pulled into Rowe's driveway. About 250 animals had been ordered; most of the families had pre-paid. Now some of them were canceling, and Rowe -- in his red baseball cap and deer-hunting jacket -- was returning up to $160 for each animal, counting out crisp bills into waiting hands.
Other families took their animals, saying they had plans to kill them somewhere else. State agriculture officials determined that such slaughter fell into a legal gray area and said they would not prosecute anyone who did so.
That was of little help to Muhammad Mannan, 56, from Bangladesh, who holds a doctorate in statistics and lives in Apex, just west of Raleigh. "But Eddie, where can we go?" Mannan asked the hog farmer Wednesday.
"Well," Rowe said, "y'all can take 'em home and kill 'em. That's what we were told."
"I do have a big backyard," Mannan said, as if thinking aloud.
