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.

Abstract

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.