Suggested space capacity for banquets held in Roone Arledge: 600. Followers of the Muslim faith worldwide: 1.57 billion.

On Monday, the Muslim Students Association (MSA) hosted its annual Eid al-Adha dinner, bringing a holiday celebrated by Muslims around the world to a comparatively microscopic scale: Columbia’s campus.

In organizing this year’s Eid al-Adha dinner, celebrated a week in advance, MSA aimed to attract crowds of all faiths, said MSA president Muzna Ansari, BC’ 10, to an audience of Muslims and non-Muslims who gathered to take part in the night’s festivities.

The reason for this, she said, was to offer a taste of the diversity of the Muslim community—the impetus behind the event’s namesake: “The Sights and Sounds of Muslims: Unity through Diversity.”

“Unity and Diversity can and must coexist,” said guest speaker Haroon Moghul, an American Muslim author and Columbia Ph.D candidate, in support of the mantra.

“If you have unity without diversity, all you have is oppression … if you have diversity without unity, you have no overarching framework. You’re saying that there’s nothing bigger than what you are.”

As anecdotal evidence of this coexistence, Moghul offered an account of a mosque service where he was accompanied by a Kosovo refugee who his family was hosting at the time.

“He grew up in a part of the world where it was normal for Muslims to be white, and I came from a part of the world where Muslims are normally brown,” he mused, recalling how his blond-haired, blue-eyed friend stood out among the crowd.

“And yet, the minute the prayer started, it was nothing new to him,” Moghul added.

This is made possible, he said, by way of a central body of rituals and prayer, the preservation of memory and a sacred geography where Mecca takes center stage.

Eid is the only time when the three are fused—it epitomizes the coming together of a diverse group of people in celebration of a holiday universal to all Muslims, he said.

Eid al-Adha, also known as the “Festival of Sacrifice,” is the latter of the two “Eids,” or “festivals,” central to the Muslim faith.

It is a celebration of Abraham’s obedience to Allah in his willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael.

According to the Qu’ran, because of Abraham’s demonstrated obedience, Allah orders the sacrifice of a lamb in Ishmael’s place.

The festival is celebrated by sacrificing an animal and sharing its meat with family, friends and the poor, fostering the spirit of solidarity and generosity.

MSA hoped to promote the spirit of giving by setting up a fundraiser in support of IDPs—“Internally Displaced People”—or refugees from Waziristan, a region in Pakistan at the center of fighting between Islamic militants and the Pakistani Government, said Ansari.

“The very human act of charity unites us all,” she said in an address to the audience.

Event organizers fused other aspects of Eid Al-Adha and Muslim culture into the night’s festivities.

The dinner began with a reading of the Qu’ran followed by musical entertainment from Bassam Saba’s New York Arab Orchestra and the Brooklyn Qawwali Party—a group of non-Muslim musicians—over helpings of Daal, Chicken Tika Masala, Nan and Gulab Jamon.

“The aim was to celebrate diversity. New York Arab Orchestra is an integration of Arabic music and modern jazz . . . the Brooklyn Qawwali Party’s music is the reinterpretation of traditional Qawwali music in the western context,” said Taimur Malik, CC ’11 and Social Chair of MSA in an interview. He spoke of what event organizers hoped to convey in bringing these entertainers to campus.

“It is a testament to the wealth and breadth of diversity in the Muslim world,” he added.