The Revelation of the Veiled in Toni Morrison's Paradise: The Whirling Dervishes in the Harem of the Convent

Abstract

Muslim women's perspective on liberatory Islamic orality (or empowerment via the oral traditions within Islam) is vastly accentuated in Fatema Mernissi's and Leila Ahmed's examinations of the harem structure. These harem narratives celebrate Sufism, Islamic theosophy that foregrounds orality and invites constant search toward divine discovery and liberation from human limitations. Recalling these narratives, Morrison's Paradise (1997) emerges as harem narrative that culls the liberatory Sufi rituals crystallized by Jalalu 'ddin Rumi, his lineage of the Mevlevi Order, and other Sufi mystics such as Mansur al-Hallaj and Muhyiddin ibn 'Arabi. Paradise celebrates Sufism as paradigmatic vision for female resistance, empowerment, and liberation. Religious contextualization of female regeneration in Paradise's scholarship does allude to any Islamic presence in the narrative's transformation rituals. Megan Sweeney argues that the Convent women's ritual explicitly trop[es] on the biblical themes of crucifixion, redemption, and resurrection (47). Echoing Sweeney, Ana Maria Fraile-Marcos reads Consolata's death as precipitator of her transformation into Christ figure (28). Critics such as Ingrid G. Daemmrich and Katrine Dalsgard identify other religious and mystic epistemologies in the Convent women's healing rite. Daemmrich contends that the Convent women's strategies to create their transient paradise are portrayed as intuitive, experimental, even mystical (225), and Dalsgard discerns quality in Piedade's tableau and perceives Consolata as a kind of high priestess who conducts ritual of almost sacramental proportions (244). Other critical interpretations accentuate the hybridity of religious associations in Consolata's healing rite. J. Brooks Bouson claims that Consolata avoids the dualisms of normative Christianity by embracing Candomble, native Afro-Brazilian religion that combines Catholicism with African spirit worship (238). Fraile-Marcos discerns reconciliation in [Consolata's] own person of the pagan religion she perceives in her gift and the Christian doctrine, both Catholic and Puritan, depleted of its patriarchal conditioning (27), and Nada Elia also accentuates Consolata's religious hybridity (Trances 144). Consistent with Fraile-Marcos's and Elia's arguments, Channette Romero posits that Consolata speaks to multiple deities and combines the Catholic precepts of service and love with the African American womanist traditions of root working and conjuring (417). No one, however, has situated Morrison's novel in an Islamic context that cultivates female empowerment. Excavating link between Islam and female liberation opens up the crucial role orality has played historically in women's liberatory spirituality and Sufism. The original impulse of Sufism is classically believed to be oral, for it has opened with the example of Muhammad and the revelation of the Qur'an (Helminski 3). Historical records and cultural studies of Sufi orders, especially the Qadiriyya, Kubrawiyya, Suhrawardiyya, Naqshbandiyya, Shadhiliyya, and Tijaniyya, acknowledge their main influence in the spread of Islam and its harmonious incorporation of oral rituals in Africa. Eric Charry identifies Sufism as the predominant form of Islam in various West African countries; it embraces African traditions because it not only allows music, but puts it to great use (556). Chronicles of the early days of the Islamic community reveal that women participated equally with men in the development of this newly emerging spiritual community. Muslim women's contribution has only sustained the spirituality and orality of Islam but also shaped its early mystic aspects. Leslie Wines observes that since its inception, Sufism had had its share of women saints, practitioners, and adepts, such as Rabi'a al-Adawiyya of Basra and Mtumwa bint 'Ali of Malawi, who initiated both men and women into the [Qadiriyya] order (64, 463-64). …