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Sacred Space Essay

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Sacred space is one of the types of spatial condition being analyzed by Mircea Eliade’s religious journal. It is related to purification and can only be apprehended by a religious person. According to Eliade, “For a religious man, a space is not homogeneous as he experiences interruption, breaks in it; some parts of space are qualitatively different from others” (20). He also believes that a person in a sacred space will ultimately reach a threshold that personify the frontier which distinguishes and opposes the two worlds. In this essay, I will compare and contrast the concept of sacred space in the biography of Maryam Binti Imran and Alice Kingsleigh. Miriam holds an independently exalted place in Islam as her name is exclusively mentioned …show more content…

On the other hand, Alice is the main mythological protagonist in the movie, “Alice in Wonderland”. Therefore, the life journey of Maryam and Alice are very exceptional because they revolves around the expanse of the sacred.
Interestingly, Maryam’s life span illustrates a sacred space because it was carefully structured by her mother and Allah (God) even before she existed. Her birth is the consequence of her mother’s sincere prayer to God, that if she is granted with an offspring, she will dedicate the child to His devotion. Continually protected and guided by the God, starting from her mother’s womb until she grew up, the notion of the sacred space is very unique for Maryam. As stated in the Qur’an, “Allah accepted Maryam as a result of her mother’s vow that He made her grow in a good manner and well-liked among the people. He made her accompany the righteous people, so that she will learn about righteousness, knowledge and religion” ( The Qur’an, …show more content…

She was tremendously dejected and withdrew herself from her family to avoid any embarrassment. It was at a secret place in the East Jerusalem where Maryam seek refuge, that she witnessed a hierophany, an irruption of the sacred that results in the detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different. Allah had sent her Gabriel (the angel) in the form of a man. This occurrence is critical in Maryam’s life because it allows Maryam to communicate and express her sadness and perplexity to God. Miriam was informed that she will give birth to a child named Isa (Jesus) and he will be among those who will be blessed by God. She then underwent the pains of childbirth alone and retuned home without speaking to anyone. Dissimilarly, Alice’s experience of the sacred space reaches the threshold twice in her life. Immediately after the very first time she crossed the boundary from the rabbit hole, she was able to distinguish the sheer differences between the two worlds. Just like the concept of threshold highlighted by Eliade, “The spatial non-homogeneity finds expression in the experience of an opposition between space that is sacred- the only real and real-ly existing space- and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it” (20). Secondly, she succeeded in killing the Jabberwocky that boiled down to

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