- Describe each of the five pillars and reflect on why they
are referred to as Pillars of Islam. - Make a detailed analysis of how one of the pillars would
function in the daily life of a particular Muslim individual. - Identify one ancient Christian community living or serving
in an Islamic majority context, such as Coptic, Maronite, Chaldean, Armenian, etc. Compare and contrast how this ancient community practices similar rituals as the Five Pillars of Islam.
This section tests your ability to interpret significant passages from a text. In a paragraph, 1) identify the author and the text, 2) identify a clear theme in the passage; remember a theme is the book’s stance on a certain issue, 3) analyze the passage in terms of this theme, supporting this theme with at least two specifics. For these specifics, look at the language (connotations of words, repetition), look at the setting, look at the images, look at the narrator’s voice (humor, irony, sympathy), look at the characters (how do they function as representations of this theme; how do they voice this theme).
Identify the text, state a clear theme, support this theme with at least two details from the passage)
For years she had been what is called “stage-struck” and had paraded through the streets with traveling men guests at her father’s hotel, wearing loud clothes and urging them to tell her of life in the cities out of which they had come. Once she startled the town by putting on men’s clothes and riding a bicycle down Main Street. In her own mind the tall dark girl had been in those days much confused. A great restlessness was in her and it expressed itself in two ways. First there was an uneasy desire for change, for some big definite movement to her life. It was this feeling that had turned her mind to the stage. She dreamed of joining some company and wandering over the world, seeing always new faces and giving something out of herself to all people. Sometimes at night she was quite beside herself with the thought, but when she tried to talk of the matter to the members of the theatrical companies that came to Wines burg and stopped at her father’s hotel, she got nowhere. They did not seem to know what she meant, or if she did get something of her passion expressed, they only laughed. “It’s not like that,” they said. “It’s as dull and uninteresting as this here. Nothing comes of it.”
With the traveling men when she walked about with them, and later with Tom Willard, it was quite different. Always they seemed to understand and sympathize with her. On the side streets of the village, in the darkness under the trees, they took hold of her hand and she thought that something unexpressed in herself came forth and became a part of an unexpressed something in them.
