The Washington Post photographed an Egyptian woman called Zeinab Mansour carrying some bones under her arm in an embarrassing reminder of the meat that her family cannot afford much of during Bairam, one of Islam's most important holidays. "One of (the bones) has a few small chunks of meat. It'll be good for soup, and to flavor the fatta," says Mansour, a 32-year-old mother of three, referring to a traditional Bairam dish of rice, bread and meat. But the bones, supplemented with a pound of fatty meat she also picked up, are a meager substitute this year. From Cairo to Baghdad, Muslims are having to pinch pennies as the global financial crisis and high inflation give new meaning to the four-day Festival of Sacrifice, which began Monday, marking the prophet Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son for God. Families are having to cut back on celebrations, and retailers are feeling the hit during a holiday when Muslims usually enjoy lavish meals of lamb or beef, distribute meat to the poor and splurge on clothes and other gifts from their children, relatives and friends. In Egypt, meat has surged to about $4 a pound ($8.20 a kilogram), up 30 percent from last year's Bairam, a painful squeeze in a country where the World Bank estimates that nearly 20 percent of the 79 million population lives on less than $2 a day. "What does it say about me, and this country, when I have to ask the butcher to give me bones that he used to throw to the dogs," asked Mansour as she walked down a litter-strewn street in Ain Shams, the teeming lower-income Cairo neighborhood where she, her husband and children live in a two-room apartment and survive on around $110 per month. The Egyptian government has been actively working to mitigate the impact of the global financial downturn. The unstated fear is that lower economic growth, lower tourism and Suez Canal revenues and high inflation could again stoke the kind of protests that erupted earlier this year, when inflation hit highs of about 24 percent.
