DBQ

CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM RELIGIOUS VIEWS

DIRECTIONS: The following question is based on the accompying documents 1-6 (some of the documents have been edited for the purpose of this exercise). Write your answer on the lined pages of the Section II free response booklet.

This question is designed to test your ability to work with and unbderstand historical documents.

Write an essay that:

1. Has a relevant thesis and supports that thesis with evidence from the documents.

2. Uses all or all but one of the documents.

3. Analyzes the documents by grouping them in as many appropriate ways as possible. Does not simply summarize the documents individually.

4. Takes into account both the sources of the documents and the author' point of view.

You may refer to relevant historical information not mentioned in the documents.

1. Analyze the varying and changing ideas among Christians and Muslims about the possible connections between an individual believer and God. Discuss the various influences -- such as religious authorities, rituals, knowledge, and philosophies -- that might facilitate or limit links between a believer and God.

What kinds of additional documentation would help you to understand the views of Christians and Muslims on their individual relationships with God?

Historical Background: By 1000 CE, the religious institutions of the Christian and Islamic world were well established. Yet debates continued within these communities between those emphasizing a mystical or personal link of the believer to God (known as sufism in Islam) and those emphasizing the need for rituals and specialized knowledge to make that connection.

DOCUMENT 1

Source: Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), an Islamic philosopher born in Persia, in an autobiographical writing, Deliverance from Error. The illness proved a difficult one. It lasted almost two months. During this time I was a sceptic in fact, though not in outward expression. Then God healed me from this disease. My self was restored to a sound and balanced condition. The necessary truths of reason became once again accepted and trusted in with complete certainty. That did not come about through proof or argument, but by a light which God cast into my breast: that light is the key to most knowledge. To suppose that the understanding of profound truth rests upon marshalled arguments is to narrow unduly the broad mercy of God. As Muhammad said, "God created the creatures in darkness, and later sprinkled on them some of his light." It is from this light that deep understanding must be sought. That light floods out from the Divine generosity at certain times, and one must be on the watch for it.

DOCUMENT 2

Source: Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), a scholar at the Islamic court in Cordoba, Spain. in "On the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy." (Ibn Rushd was known to Christians as Averroes.) You ought to know that the purpose of Scripture is simply to teach true science and right practice. True science is knowledge of Cod, Blessed and Exalted, and the other beings as they really are, and especially of noble beings, and knowledge of happiness and misery in the next life.... We say: The purpose of Scripture is to teach true science and right practice; and teaching is of two classes-concepts and judgments-as the logicians have shown. Now the methods available to men of arriving at judgments are three: demonstrative. dialectical and rhetorical; and the methods of forming concepts are two: either the object itself or a symbol of it. But not everyone has the natural ability to take in demonstrations or dialectical arguments, let alone demonstrative arguments which are so hard to learn and need so much time even for those who are qualified to learn them. Therefore, since it is the purpose of Scripture simply to teach everyone, Scripture has to contain every method of bringing about judgments of assents and every method of forming concepts.

DOCUMENT 3

Source: Pope Innocent III (ruled 1198-1216), in an address to the Fourth Lateran Council, 1215. There is one Universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation. In which there is the same priest and sacrifice, Jesus Christ, whose body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine; the bread being changed by divine power into the body, and the wine into the blood, so that to realize the mystery of unity we may receive of Him what He has received of us. And this sacrament no one can effect except the priest who has been duly ordained in accordance with the keys of the Church, which Jesus Christ Himself gave to the Apostles and their successors.

DOCUMENT 4

Source: Saint Gregory Palamas (d. 1359), an Eastern Orthodox monk, mystical theologian, and archbishop of Thessalonica, in The One Hundred Fifty Chapters. Not only are man's knowledge of God and his understanding of himself and his proper rank (which knowledge now belongs to those who are Christians, even those considered uneducated laymen) a more lofty knowledge than natural science and astronomy and any philosophy in these subjects, but also our mind's knowledge of its own weakness and the search for its healing would be incomparably superior by far to the investigation and knowledge of the magnitudes of the stars and the reasons for natural phenomena, the origins of things below and the circuits of things above.... For the mind that realizes its own weakness has discovered whence it might enter upon salvation and draw near to the light of knowledge and receive true wisdom which does not pass away with this age . .

DOCUMENT 5

Source: John Wickliff (1328-1384), an English Catholic priest, in a critique of doctrines of the papacy. Now understand you the words of our Savior Christ, as he spoke them one after another-as Christ spoke them. For he took bread and blessed, and yet what blessed he? The scripture says not that Christ took bread and blessed it, or that he blessecl the bread which he had taken. Therefore it seems more that he blessed his disciples and apostles, whom he had ordained witnesses of his passion; and in them he left his blessed word which is the bread of life, as it is written, Not only in bread lives man, but in every word that proceeds out of the moth of God [Matthew IV] We are sown in natural bodies, and shall rise again spiritual bodies. Then if Christ shall change thus our deadly bodies by death, and God the Father spared not his own Son, as it is written, but that death should reign in him as in us, and that he should be translated into a spiritual body, as the first again rising of dead men. Then how say the hypocrites that take on them to make our Lord's body?

DOCUMENT 6

Source: Ibn Khaldun a general introduction to history. (1332-1406), a scholar and official born in Tunis, in the Muqqadamah. Tradition scholars and jurists who discuss the articles of faith often mention that God is separate from His creatures. The speculative theologians say that He is neither separate nor connected. The philosophers say that He is neither in the world nor outside it. The recent Sufis say that He is one with the creatures in the sense that He is incarnate in them or in the sense that He is identical with them and there exists nothing but Himself either in the whole or in any part of it. A number of recent Sufis who consider intuitive perceptions to be scientific and logical hold the opinion that the Creator is one with His creatures in His identity, His existence and His attributes. The Oneness assumed by the Sufis is identical with the incarnation the Christians claim for the Messiah. It is even stranger, in that it is the incarnation of something primeval in something, created and the Oneness of the former witrh the latter.