World religions. Рахимбергенова М.Х. - 50 стр.

     5. Its immediate basis is the Talmud rather than the Bible.                  PA R T I I I
     6. Enlargement of the concept of Torah to include the Talmud.
     7. A religion of the individual and the family, and of everyday life, ex-                                        ISLAM
pressed in Holy Days, rites of passage, dietary laws, and the use of symbols in
prayer.                                                                                                          The Spirit of Islam
                                                                                       The following excerpt is taken from an autobiographical novel Heirs to the
Questions for discussion:                                                         Past by the Moslem writer Driss Chraibi. The occasion is the funeral of the old
    1. What reasons might incline you to believe in the existence of a personal   father of the family, for which the emigre son, Driss Ferdi, has returned from
God?                                                                              the secular rationalism of Paris, where he has spent the last sixteen years in a
    2. What reasons might incline you not to so believe?                          steady erosion of his Moslem convictions and identity.
    3. To what extend can the idea of human rights be traced back to ancient           Then a man stood up … and began to chant. What he chanted was of no
Hebrew religion?                                                                  importance. It was not the words, nor the meaning, nor even the symbolism,
    4. How would you compare and contrast Judaism with Confucianism?              which moved our hearts, the men, women and children who were there. We
                                                                                  forgot why we were there the moment he began to chant. It was the incantation,
Test questions:                                                                   and the end of our woes and miserable little problems, the aching and yet serene
    1. Explain what is meant by “ethical monotheism”.                             longing for that other life which is ours and to which we are all destined to re-
    2. Explain the concept of revelation.                                         turn, the victors and the defeated, the fully developed and those who are still at
    3. Explain the idea of the covenant.                                          the larva state, the faithful and the atheists, through God’s great compassion.
    4. Explain the concept of Torah.                                              There was all of that in the voice of the man who stood chanting in the sun, and
    5. What is the Talmud?                                                        we were in his voice, I was in his voice despite the vast legacy of incredulity
    6. What was the role of ritual sacrifice in Hebrew religion and Judaism?      that I had received from the West. When he reached the end of a verse, he
    7. Describe the worldview of Judaism, comparing and contrasting it to that    paused, and so it came about – an outburst of fervour. And while he chanted it
of Theravada Buddhism.                                                            was like a man in the wilderness chanting his faith. And the voice rose and
                                                                                  swelled, changed in tone, became tragic, soared and then floated down on our
                                                                                  heads like a seagull gliding gently and softly, little more than a whisper. And so
                                                                                  – never again will I go in search of intellectuals, of written truths, synthetic
                                                                                  truths, of collections of hybrid ideas which are nothing but ideas. Never again
                                                                                  will I travel the world in search of a shadow of justice, fairness, progress, or
                                                                                  schemes calculated to change mankind. I was weary and I was returning to my
                                                                                  clan. The man who was not even aware of his voice or of his faith was alive and
                                                                                  held the secret of life – a man who could not even have been a dustman in this
                                                                                  world of founts of knowledge and of civilization. Peace and everlasting truth
                                                                                  were in him and in his voice, while all was crumbling around him and on the
                                                                                  continents.

                                                                                  Question for discussion:
                                                                                       Driss Ferdi is here described as being led by the muezzin’s voice to experi-
                                                                                  ence some larger perspective than the merely intellectual. What could account
                                                                                  for this experience?



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