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This essay scrutinizes a key religious myth in Biblical (Jewish and Christian)(1) and Qur’anic (Islamic) traditions,(2) the myth of Abraham and his willingness to sacrifice his most beloved son as God has commanded, a sacrifice not needed when God sends a ram or lamb from heaven as a substitute offering. It analyses the ways in which this myth encapsulates the ethnic and/or religious identity of Muslim communities in the Balkans, Bulgaria in particular. In so doing, it examines the correspondence between belief systems in both Slavia Orthodoxa(3) and Slavia Islamica,(4) and focuses upon the correlation between the written canon of the Sacred Scriptures, the Bible and/or the Qur’an, and the oral convention of folk religion.(5) Indeed, as fieldwork amongst rural communities in South-Eastern Europe indicates, the Abrahamic sacrifice is regarded by both Christians [Petkanova-Toteva 1978: 189-201]; Stojčevska-Antić 1987: 159-61; Popova 1995 I/1: 14570; Badalanova and Miltenova 1996] and Muslims [Djordjević 1984: 205]; Blagoev 1996: 70-83; 1999: 312-340] as the basic building block of their sacred Kurban ritual ceremonies, a theologeme, while the image (and/or name of) Abraham/Ibrahim functions as the epitome of sanctity and a symbol of unconditional faith.(6) The epistemological principles of the present essay are relatively simple and straightforward. My approach to the 'religions of the book', a term used for the religions based on the Bible and/or the Qur’an, is anthropological;(7) but unlike many anthropologists who begin from theoretical presuppositions and then impose them upon the actual material, I build my arguments in the opposite way, empirically from the texts. In this I focus upon the oral hermeneutics of the Holy Scriptures, with special regard to their vernacular vocabulary; my work rests upon a corpus of folklore material collected over the last century and a half, which either refer to the Biblical account of the Filial Sacrifice, or

Folk religion in the Balkans and the Qur’anic account of Abraham