Hany Abu-Assad, the director, spends nearly twelve minutes in constructing Said’s character before Said is approached by Jamal, who informs him that he and Khaled have been selected for a suicide mission. Jamal is a spiritual leader of an unnamed militant group in Nablus. He says, “We decided to answer the assassination of Abu Hazem … There’s an operation planned for tomorrow in Tel Aviv.” In this scene, the director sets up the motivational framework as we can see both ends: retaliation and expression of faith. Therefore, one wonders if Said’s motivation is his faith and religion, or revenge. However, Said is not a religious person. Despite his mentioning of God’s name, Said’s revenge motive prevails over his faith because “God willing” …show more content…
Like any ordinary person, Said enjoys laying in the grass, smoking and talking about girls. One of the five pillars of Islam is to perform a ritual prayer five times a day. In Paradise Now, Said doesn’t appear in any scene praying, except the funeral prayer he does in congregation before going on the suicide mission. In Islam, funeral prayer is performed for dead Muslims, while there are no dead there; therefore, the prayer is practically invalid and meaningless. Also, when Said returns from Suha’s house in the early morning, he sees Jamal praying, but he intentionally avoids praying. If Said really cares about religion, he would never miss the morning prayer, especially the very last morning of his life. Accordingly, Abu-Assad successfully identifies Said as a person neither committed, nor interested in …show more content…
They enter into a lengthy debate, while Said’s intention and motivation behind the mission becomes clearer than ever before. The leader admonishes Said and tells him to go home in a sign that the operation is canceled. However, Said explains very clearly why he needs to proceed with the mission and eventually convinces the leader. Said explains: Said, here, gives precise reasons for his intended action as well as the wisdom of his decision to keep on the mission. As it is, his speech lacks any religious references. Instead, his motivations are summed up in confronting the daily humiliation and injustice by the only means he has, which is his body. In order to achieve justice, Said thinks that only in death can Israelis and Palestinians be equal. With the burden of his father's transgression on his shoulders, retaliation is the only answer. Therefore, Said has more personal reasons for his actions; a ghost from his past that haunts
Heaven is a Playground is a book, published in 1974 by author Rick Telander, about Telander’s journey to New York City and the summer he spent there for a magazine piece, acclimating himself with the culture that existed on inner-city basketball courts in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. While he was there, he met a man by the name of Rodney Parker. Parker was kind of like a street agent because he worked tirelessly to get a lot of these inner-city kids into school. In the book, Telander talks about all of his experiences with the people in the neighborhood and the relationships he developed with the kids, whom he would eventually go on to coach.
Laura Deeb’s An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’i Lebanon seeks to rectify post-9/11 notions of political Islam as anti-modern and incongruous with Western formulations of secular modernity. Specifically, Deeb is writing in opposition to a Weberian characterization of modern secular Western societies as the development of bureaucracies through social rationalization and disenchantment. Within this Weberian framework Deeb asserts that Shia communities are in-part modern because of the development of beuorocratic institutions to govern and regulate religious practice. However, Deeb makes a stronger argument oriented towards dislodging the assumptions "that Islamism is static and monolithic, and that
If there is someone that is doing something they don't want them to do they will take them and kill them. Like Clarisse, she was killed by someone because she was asking too many questions and doing something that they didn't want her to do. She would ask questions that people have never heard before. Clarisse would stay up all night and witness what other people did not see ever, like the wet grass in the morning. Clarisse shows this by saying, “Bet I know something else you don’t.
The seat of faith resides in the will of the individual and not in the leaning to our own reasoning, for reasoning is the freedom of choosing what one accepts as one’s will. In considering the will was created and one cannot accuse the potter or the clay, Milton writes to this reasoning, as “thir own revolt,” whereas the clay of humankind is sufficient and justly pliable for use as a vessel of obedience or disobedience (3.117). The difficulty of this acceptance of obedience or disobedience is inherent in the natural unwillingness in acknowledging that we are at the disposal of another being, even God. One theme of Paradise Lost is humankind’s disobedience to a Creator, a Creator that claims control over its creation. When a single living thing which God has made escapes beyond the Creator’s control this is in essence an eradicating of the Creator God. A Creator who would create a creature who the Creator would or could not control its creation is not a sovereign God. For who would not hold someone responsible for manufacturing something that could not be controlled and consider it immoral to do so? To think that God created a universe that he has somehow abdicated to its own devices is to accredit immorality to the Creator. Since the nucleus of Milton’s epic poem is to “justifie the wayes of God” to his creation, these ‘arguments’ are set in theological Miltonesque terms in his words (1. 26). Milton’s terms and words in Paradise Lost relate the view of God to man and Milton’s view to the reader. Views viewed in theological terms that have blazed many wandering paths through the centuries to knot up imperfect men to explain perfect God.
Ayoob, M. (2007) The Many Faces of Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Muslim
Burns, Thomas J. "Islam." Religion and Society. OU Campus' Dale Hall, Norman. 14 Apr. 2014. Lecture.
“Paradise Found and Lost” from Daniel J. Boorstin’s The Discoverers, embodies Columbus’ emotions, ideas, and hopes. Boorstin, a former Librarian of Congress, leads the reader through one man’s struggles as he tries to find a Western Passage to the wealth of the East. After reading “Paradise Found and Lost,” I was enlightened about Columbus’ tenacious spirit as he repeatedly fails to find the passage to Asia. Boorstin title of this essay is quite apropos because Columbus discovers a paradise but is unable to see what is before him for his vision is too jaded by his ambition.
The Islamic tradition, as reflected in Naguib Mahfouz’s Zaabalawi, has over the course of history had an incredible impact on Arab culture. In Mahfouz’s time, Islamic practices combined with their political relevance proved a source of both great power and woe in Middle Eastern countries. As alluded to in Zaabalawi, Mahfouz asserts the fact that not all Muslims attain religious fulfillment through this common tradition, and other methods outside the scope of Islam may be necessary in true spiritual understanding.
However, this attack on the commander and launch sites came as an immediate response to heavy Palestinian rocket fire over the previous weeks and prevention of other “Palestinian factions from building up their arsenals further. In a statement made by the Israeli Defense Force spokesman, he justifies the assassination of Ahmed Jabari stating “The first aim of this operation is to br...
There is a strong belief that Islam and politics are directly tied. They are tied in the sense that the building blocks of the religion dictate how they ought to behave in the political environment. Through this mandatory follow up behavior that the religion delineates, many have come to believe that its teachings are a form of terrorism. Mandaville argues that what has challenged the Islamic link between politics and religion was the emergence of secularism, which went against the belief that politics and religion could go together. Islam has been a religion that has been accused of supporting terrorist activities in the world. Different assumptions have been brought up to understand better the linkages between what really lies behind the Islam religion and politics. Peter Mandaville argues that Islam is dynamic and that it has changed over time; situated within time and politics.
Kristiana Kahakauwila's, a local Hawaiian brought up in California, perspective view of Hawaii is not the one we visually outwardly recognize and perceive in a tourist brochure, but paints a vivid picture of a modern, cutting edge Hawai`i. The short story "This Is Paradise", the ironically titled debut story accumulation, by Kahakauwila, tell the story of a group narrative that enacts a bit like a Greek ensemble of voices: the local working class women of Waikiki, who proximately observe and verbally meddle and confront a careless, puerile youthful tourist, named Susan, who is attracted to the more foreboding side of the city's nightlife. In this designation story, Susan is quieted into innocent separated by her paradisiacal circumventions, lulled into poor, unsafe naïve culls. Kahakauwila closes her story on a dismal somber note, where the chorus, do to little too late of what would have been ideal, to the impairment of all. Stereotype, territorial, acceptance, and unity, delineates and depicts the circadian lives of Hawaiian native locals, and the relationships with the neglectful, candid tourists, all while investigating and exploring the pressure tension intrinsically in racial and class division, and the wide hole in recognition between the battle between the traditional Hawaiian societal culture and the cutting edge modern world infringing on its shores.
Hamlet's obsession with death also fuels his desire for revenge, for instance when he revisits the ghost and he explains how he died. Hamlet, saying, "O my prophetic soul! My uncle'" (1.5.48), realizes that Cla...
Thomas W. Lippman gives an introduction to the Muslim world in the book Understanding Islam. He has traveled throughout the Islamic world as Washington Post bureau chief for the Middle East, and as a correspondent in Indochina. This gave him, in his own words, "sharp insight into the complexities of that turbulent region." However, the purpose of the book is not to produce a critical or controversial interpretation of Islamic scripture. It is instead to give the American layman an broad understanding of a religion that is highly misunderstood by many Americans. In this way he dispels many myths about "Muslim militants," and the otherwise untrue perception of Islamic violence. In this way the American reader will become more knowledgeable about an otherwise unfamiliar topic. However, the most significant element of Lippman’s book is that it presents Islam in a simple way that makes the reader feels his awareness rise after each chapter. This encourages him to continue learning about the world’s youngest major religion. Understanding Islam dispels many misconceptions about the Muslim world, and presents the subject in a way that urges his reader to further his understanding of Islam through continued study.
...s the ordinary Syrian who tries hard to surmount he difficulties of everyday life and who is tired of political slogans” (qtd. in Lawson 416).
Robinson, B.A. (2002, October 14). Islam: Is it a religion of violence or of peace.