“A Halal Happy Ever After”: Envisioning Muslim Futures in Islamically Minded Children’s Literature

Abstract What future aspirations have informed the incentives for producing children’s literature in Muslim minority communities? What social dynamics and theological debates have accompanied its visions of Islamic futures? What narrative tropes, visual-aesthetics norms and literary genres has it appropriated, while maturing into an innovative religious-pedagogic-literary expression? Probing such questions, this article challenges distinctions between “Islamic” and “secular” to build a concept of Islamically minded children’s literature . It follows the diversification of the literature as a globalised child cultural format, emulating genres such as picture books, fairy tales, detective stories, romantic fiction, autobiographies, handbooks, graphic novels and comics. As cultural texts, Islamically minded children’s literature has developed through increasingly confident, open-ended and dialogic literary negotiations of the socio-cultural complexities of Muslim minority life vis-à-vis the formative pasts of sacred history, theology and textual canons – all under the pedagogical sway of envisioning Islam and Muslim futures, in minority communities and beyond.