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Abstract Header

Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Works Through an Islamic Lens: The Absence of Islam in Moses, Man of the Mountain and Jonah’s Gourd Vine.

Alqahtani, Asma Abdullah Saud
http://orcid.org/0009-0005-7006-2420
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1704335878745529

Abstract Details

2023, Master of Arts (MA), Wright State University, English.
Zora Neale Hurston is an African-American writer, anthropologist, and ethnographer of the Harlem Renaissance. She is distinguished for documenting and celebrating the religions of African Americans in the South. In this study, the author argues that Hurston represents the practiced religions in Southern African-American communities in Jonah’s Gourd Vine and Moses, Man of the Mountain while noticeably omitting Islam, despite the fact that Islam predominated in more Northern African-American Communities as a reclaimed religious history and practice. Hurston’s exclusion prompts inquiries into the history of Islamic erasures in Southern African-American communities and introduces ambiguity in interpreting the metaphors found in Jonah’s Gourd Vine because of the differences between the Biblical and Quranic narratives surrounding the figure of Jonah. The author concludes that Hurston omits Islam because it was not noticeably practiced in the South among the African-American community. Finally, the author argues that Muslim readers must understand the Biblical Jonah to understand the metaphorical meanings of the vine relative to the protagonist John Buddy Pearson in Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine.
Crystal B. Lake, Ph.D. (Committee Chair)
Andrew Strombeck, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
Shengrong Cai, Ph.D. (Committee Member)
40 p.
African American Studies; African Americans; Literature; Religion; Religious History; Spirituality
Zora; Hurston; religions; Islam; Quran; Bible; Hoodoo; Gourd Vine; Moses; Harlem

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Alqahtani, A. A. S. (2023). Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Works Through an Islamic Lens: The Absence of Islam in Moses, Man of the Mountain and Jonah’s Gourd Vine. [Master's thesis, Wright State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1704335878745529

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Alqahtani, Asma. Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Works Through an Islamic Lens: The Absence of Islam in Moses, Man of the Mountain and Jonah’s Gourd Vine. . 2023. Wright State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1704335878745529.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Alqahtani, Asma. "Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Works Through an Islamic Lens: The Absence of Islam in Moses, Man of the Mountain and Jonah’s Gourd Vine. ." Master's thesis, Wright State University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1704335878745529

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

wright1704335878745529
75
© 2023, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Works Through an Islamic Lens: The Absence of Islam in Moses, Man of the Mountain and Jonah’s Gourd Vine. by Asma Abdullah Saud Alqahtani is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by Wright State University and OhioLINK.