The African American tafsir (interpretation) of the Islamic harem: Female resistance in Morrison's 'Paradise'

This dissertation excavates the Islamic presence in Toni Morrison's Paradise and highlights the narrative's intertextual evocation of the politics of the harem, a major proclamation of gender boundaries in Islam. In particular, this study shows how Morrison's Paradise initiates a cultural dialogue on the Islamic harem by constructing its African American version that contests sexism, racism, religious fanaticism, and cultural marginalization. In Paradise, the pillars of harem women's resistance comprise subversive aesthetics of orality, narration, domesticity, motherhood, sisterhood, and sexuality. These models of harem resistance link Paradise to transgressive harem narratives in the Muslim diaspora, such as Arabian Nights, Fatima Mernissi's Dreams of Trespass, and Leila Ahmed's A Border Passage. This study follows an interdisciplinary approach as it engages Muslim women writers' sociological and historical exegeses of the Islamic doctrines and gender politics of the harem, such as Mernissi's Scherehazade Goes West, Beyond the Veil, The Veil and the Male Elite and Ahmed's Women and Gender in Islam. The construction of a harem in Morrison's Paradise develops an African American reality of female agency and liberation that reconciles the disrupted African and Islamic identities. In this context, this dissertation relies on the historical and cultural studies that reveal examples of Islam's harmonious incorporation of African rituals and invite a contrapuntal investigation of Morrison's engagement of Islam as a manifestation of the African presence in her historio-narratology. The reading of Paradise as a harem narrative highlights its pedagogical significance as a paradigm for teaching the African American facet of the harem and rectifies gaps in women's and comparative studies that trace the heterogeneity of harem resistance across cultures.