today is eid al-adha, a major holiday in islam. without getting into the faithy details, the gist of the celebrations involve sacrificing an animal for a feast (to represent abraham's willingness to sacrifice to god) and thus eating. prayers are attended in one's finest clothing and, like eid ul-fitr at the end of ramadan, muslims greet eachother with "eid mubarak" (in arabic as the subject of this post).

the chinese name for the holiday is 古尔邦节, gǔěrbāng jié. 百度有信息这里。

interestingly, the name gǔěrbāng may be a transliteration of קרבן, a hebrew word meaning sacrifice that appears in the new testament once, untranslated, as corban in mark 7:11. i'm not sure why the name would have been brought into chinese from hebrew and not arabic or turkish, but there it is.

edit: i've been digging around a little since i originally wrote this and found that sure enough in farsi it's called عید قربان eid e-qurban. that means in uighur it would probably be something nearly idencical (which it is), and so then the chinese would have come from the uighur much like most chinese names in the area.

so there that is.


edit: farwestchina.com has a post on lunar calendrics re eid ul-adha in xinjiang. possibly more on the celebrations (tomorrow in xinjiang) as events unfold?

عيد مبارك يا شباب