The extravagant chandeliers, beautiful landscape paintings, and textured ceilings that are inside the restaurant Papa Marco’s in Waukegan Illinois make a wonderful first impression for first time and returning customers alike. The architecture of the restaurant is reminiscent of middle eastern artwork and values, yet is also heavily influenced by Christian designs instead of taking inspiration from the Islamic religion. Unlike the influence of Christianity on Papa Marco’s, the movies Turtles can fly and The color of Paradise are heavily influenced by classical Islamic beliefs and traditions. In Turtles can fly and The color of Paradise, both movies demonstrate classical middle eastern traditions by speaking in languages such as Farsi and Kurdish. …show more content…
In both of the movies, the characters and scenes heavily revolved around the Islamic faith. This is more than evident in the movie Turtles can fly. In one of the scenes, a young boy named Satellite is constantly called upon by elders and members of the local mosque to perform favors for them, like translating what was on the tv to protect them from the war that was going on.Many times in the movie the mosque was featured, but that was not the only religious symbolism in the movies. In The color of Paradise, the main character Mohammed who is blind talks about his faith and spirituality in a particularly touching scene. When Mohammed’s father drops him off to a carpenter’s house who is also blind, he explores the house for a little while before the carpenter shows him to the backyard where most of his supplies are. He teaches Mohammed how to cut the wood based purely on the feel of it. This causes an emotional reaction within Mohammed, because the young boy starts tearing up. Exclaiming that he reaches his hands out to touch everything because he is trying to feel God, this brings up the boy’s belief in religion and how he pursued it …show more content…
It is not overly suggestive of religious overtones, but the high ceilings, the family styled landscapes, and chandeliers almost look like a cathedral. Even when talking about his Christian faith, he also proudly talked about his middle Eastern origins. When asked about how he learned to cook, he mentioned that he learned from his mother. Specific dishes that he mentioned was Shawarma and Kebabs. The origins of these dishes are from Lebanon, Turkey, Israel, and Syria. According to both the owner and the chef who was currently at the counter when I was interviewing the owner, these dishes are made by first marinating the meat in olive oil, oregeno, and tumeric. After descring some of the ingrediants they used (but surely not all of them), they described the process as sometimes long, and something that involved a lot of love and care. This promtpted my curiosity over the question, ‘Do you believe that food can create peace between nations that are fueding or families that don’t get along?’ With a brief moment of silence, he then answered. ‘Absoltuely.’ It was easy to tell that he truly believed what he said, and not just answering with a postive answer just for the sake of looking
In Bless the Beasts and the Children, symbols and motifs help progress the story and develop the theme that ?when faced with a certain situation, boys will do great things?. The boys can use symbols and motifs to help them get through obstacles without giving up and acheive their goal. The boys also give up symbols and motifs they used for comfort or stability that they no longer need because of their independence and maturity.
Betrayal is being disloyal to others and even oneself, therefore betrayal can cause many emotional fallouts and baggage within relationships. In the story, The World on the Turtle's Back, betrayal is a huge factor in how the story plays out, as it is in the song The Letter by Kehlani, Genesis 4:1-16, and Matthew 26:14-16 . Three ways in which betrayal is portrayed in the story, the song, and the Bible is by the actions people take to one another, disconnections in relationships that lead to betrayal, and emotional baggage.
The Loss of Innocence- The title of the novel Fallen Angels immediately emphasizes the theme of youth and innocence. As Lieutenant Carroll explains in Chapter 4, all soldiers are “angel warriors,” because the soldiers are still young boys and still as innocent as angels. In calling the novel Fallen Angels, Myers implies that the soldiers’ youth and innocence are more important than any of their other aspects, such as their religion, ethnicity, class, or race. The novel is first and foremost a tale of the lost innocence of a squad of soldiers in the Vietnam War. Richie is only seventeen when he enters Vietnam, and Peewee and the other members of the squad are also teenagers—Peewee is unable even to grow a mustache. His three life goals, immaturely, are to drink wine from a corked bottle, to smoke a cigar, and to make love to a foreign woman. Richie and Lobel are both virgins, and they fantasize endlessly about their first sexual experiences. Though the soldiers enter the war as naïve youths, the war quickly changes them and forces them to develop into young men. Surrounded by death, they are forced to contemplate the fragility of their own lives and stripped of the carelessness and brazenness of youth. The unspeakable horrors around the boys force them to contemplate a world that does not conform to their childish and simplistic notions. Where they want to see only a separation between right and wrong, they instead find moral ambiguity. Where they want to see order and meaning, they find only chaos and senselessness. Where they want to find heroism, they find only the selfish instinct of self-preservation. These realizations destroy the boys’ innocence, prematurely thrusting them into manhood.
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini, is a story about a young boy named Amir that begins in 1975 in Kabul, Afghanistan. As a child, he mistreats his servant, Hassan, who is like a brother to him. After failing to intervene in Hassan 's rape, Amir lives with guilt until his late thirties when he is presented with a chance at redemption. Amir 's father’s old friend, Rahim Khan, called from Pakistan to summon Amir to him. Upon his arrival, Amir learns that Hassan is his illegitimate half-brother. Hassan had been killed and his son had become an orphan. Amir then goes to drastic lengths to find and retrieve Hassan 's son, Sohrab. During this time Amir faces the guilt of his past and finds peace with himself while saving Sohrab
“Culture belongs to the imagination; to judge it rationally is to misunderstand its function” (Wilson 79). In “The Butterfly Mosque” by G. Willow Wilson, she acknowledges culture and explains why cultures can differ so greatly. She emphasizes why its highly inconclusive to try to find a meaning behind ones culture. As a young American Muslim women she is faced with cross cultural ironies as she tries to find her identity and where she fits in. Her conversion to Islam brings into light her internalized prejudice and the different perspectives of Westerners towards the Middle East and vice versa. In her memoir, she depicts both positive and negative aspects of both cultures and, her struggle to find a common ground between the two.
While there are some significant similarities between these two faiths, there are also some major differences. Firstly, in Islam, God works through prophets and does not have a physical form. They do not believe in idols and cannot have images of God. However, in the Nation of Islam, Fard Muhammad was the re-incarnation of Allah. He was essentially God in the physical form, which is what Islam goes
“All men have need of the gods” (Guillemets). Homer is correct; all men can use a god. We need support, hope, and a way to control the masses. Within the classic novel Lord of the flies by William Golding, there are many religious symbols. Lord of the Flies is best read as a religious allegory because Simon is a Jesus figure, Ralph and Jack are like Cain and Abel, the boys start to create a Pagan like religion and treat the beast like a god.
In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the boys who are stranded on the island come in contact with many unique elements that symbolize ideas or concepts. Through the use of symbols such as the beast, the pig's head, and even Piggy's specs, Golding demonstrates that humans, when liberated from society's rules and taboos, allow their natural capacity for evil to dominate their existence.
...s a scene from an imagined future Jerusalem where Islam’s Dome of the Rock stands beside a rebuilt Jewish temple and worshipers of different faiths mingle in the courtyard. Is this scene too good to be true? Does each religious claim to the Dome of the Rock, reinforced through visual culture, make such an event unlikely to ever occur? It is ideas such as these that I hope to examine further in my paper.
Four different people, four different lifestyles, all with at least one thing in common—their races (or so we have yet to discover). I began my interviews wanting to show the similarities and differences in eating habits and traditions with the African American perspective in mind. Although race is used as the combining factor in this situation, each individual’s lifestyle, cultural behavior, and even eating habits are all very unique. My interviewees consisted of four Americans, as mentioned before all of same race, with similar yet very distinct backgrounds. They range from a black Jew, to a “Jamerican,” to what I would call a “traditional southerner”, right on down to a modern day Muslim. They all agreed to fill me in and reveal to others the details of their personal history and family backgrounds. Geography, family tradition, and religion all play factors in what they eat as it always has dating back to ancestral times. I began with “JJ Alex;” a 20 year old African American male from the east coast. He is a middle class college student. JJ Alex sounds like your typical college student but he is far from typical. What singles him out from many of his other peers is his religion. You might ask, “How would his religion relate to his eating lifestyle unless he’s a Muslim?” “He couldn’t possibly be Jewish—or could he?” A black Jew—better known as a Seventh Day Holiness. His great grandfather was a Rabbi and the basic teachings in his religion are as followed: his faith believes the Sabbath (day of rest) to begin at sunset on Friday lasting until sunset on Saturday; some worshippers wear Yarmulke; his faith also follows the Old Testament of the Bible; and they wear the Star of David.
In each novel there is a very different religious influence, Amir has his barely practicing father, whereas Kambili has the devout christian overbearing father in Eugene. Amir is a muslim and Kambili is a christian, both very different faiths, even if both have similar ideas and laws written in the Bible and The Qur’an. Over the course of The Kite Runner Amir is pushed towards faith by looking for support in terrible times, he shows this when sohrab is in the hospital, “I get on my knees, lower my forehead to the ground, .my tears soaking the sheet … Then I remember I haven 't prayed for over fifteen years.”(Hosseini 345) This shows how Amir only prayed, believed in god and his power in a time of great need, he wanted to cover all the bases and help Sohrab in any way he could, and this was all he could do. When he realized that he hadn 't prayed in fifteen years it shows how he only turned to god in desperate times and was needing to be pushed towards faith not the other way around. In Purple Hibiscus Kambili grows up under the overly religious and controlling Papa and so she from the start is very religious and easily influenced, this is shown when Kambili say this whilst talking to Aunty Ifeoma, “I sucked my tongue to unfreeze it, tasting the gritty dust ‘because papa nnukwu is a pagan’. Papa would be proud I
One of the reasons why Muslims were able to achieve so much is because they are strict religious people. Most everything they do is in the name of their God, Allah. Documents two, six, seven, and eight give examples of their cultural activities. Document six exhibits calligraphy. Calligraphy is used to decorate buildings, mosques, and objects in glory of Allah. Calligraphy is used to represent the word of God in different ways other than letters to show that Allah is the creator of all. It is also used to reduce the amount of art to avoid the idolatry of pictures that are meant to worship Allah. Today, cursive may have been created from the elegant writing of calligraphy. In calligraphy, words can be used to become pictures and have a deeper meaning than the picture. Calligraphy is also used in the Dome of the Rock. Muslims worship Allah at the Dome of the Rock, which is located in Jerusalem, shown in document seven. The Dome of the Rock is a dome that is on top of a building to worship Allah. In the twenty-first century, domes are used for many buildings. Even the big sphere in Epoct, Disney World is an extension of the Dome of Rock. Document eight has an excerpt form the Quran and Persian Poems to compare the two. The Quran is the Holy Bible for Muslims and is the base of Arabic literature and poetry. The Quran is written in a way that voices the writer, which many poems do today. The figurative language and choice in words have affected the ways of wr...
The restaurant has drawn attention after a customer, pleased with the discount, posted a picture of the receipt on her facebook page. Unexpectedly (although perhaps not surprisingly), the photo went viral. Shama Blalock, one of the diner's co-owners, confirmed for National Public Radio that the photo was real, and that the restaurant does indeed offer occasional surprise discounts for some patrons who pray before eating.
“The presence of God is the finest of rewards.” (Yann Martel, Life of Pi 63) In Yann Martel’s riveting novel “Life of Pi” The basic plot of survival unfolds, however, this essay will show how the hidden yet the dominant theme of religion throughout the story is what helped the main character Piscine Molitor Patel (Pi) survive.
At the first glance, Islam and Christianity appear to have nothing in common, however; as you go beyond the surface, they appear to have many similarities such as their beliefs of God, their beliefs of life after death, their holy scriptures, and their prayers. These religions, although two entirely different beliefs, share a similar origin. Like many other religions, they both claim to be the one and only true way to God. In order to truly see and understand their similarities, one must date back to the rise and birth of Christianity and Islam. Throughout the course of this essay, I will compare the many facets that show the alikeness between these two growing religions.