This chapter explores the brand of Islamic children’s literature produced in diaspora, in order to discern how this supplementary educational tool has responded to key concerns of Islamic education. How is Islamic faith staged in diasporic literary depiction? What innovative formats are employed and how does such innovation affect the content? Rather than understanding this literature in terms of mere adaptations of novel formats, Islamic children’s literature is explored as a mode for cultural negotiation in and of itself. It ambiguously balances between a defensive-exclusive and offensive-inclusive cultural stance. On the one hand, and in its early phases, it has been formulated as a defense of religious principles in a sociocultural context defined as threatening, in face of which Islam is mobilized as a safety mechanism. In such aspects, Islamic children’s literature has essentially reproduced cautious and socio-conservative literary patterns in the Arab and/or Muslim world at large.
Source: Handbook of Islamic Education
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