Heritage literacy beyond the home: ‘urfic-ummatic negotiations in contemporary Muslim picturebooks

This study examines how contemporary Muslim picturebooks (2020–2025) transmit Islamic heritage while addressing two audiences: Muslim insider and non-Muslim outsider readers. Drawing on heritage literacy (Bhatt, I., and Z. Li. 2026. “Towards Understanding Heritage Literacy.” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 47 (3): 1493–1510), the ‘urfic-ummatic spectrum (Bhatt, I., O. Z. Barnawi, and R. Ahmad. 2025. “Exploring a Sociolinguistics of Islam.” Applied Linguistics. Advance Online Publication), and social semiotics (Kress, G., and T. van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. Routledge), we conducted a qualitative multimodal analysis of 23 commercially published picturebooks representing Palestinian, South Asian, Persian/Iranian, Black American Muslim, and Western diaspora contexts. Our cross-cultural collaborative methodology pairs a Singaporean-Malay Muslim researcher with a Christian African American researcher, both based in the United States, integrating insider and outsider perspectives. The findings reveal three interconnected dimensions. First, picturebooks transmit heritage through multimodal layering: Islamic textual authority (hadith, Quranic verses), Arabic-English code-meshing, visual Islamic elements, and narrative arcs modelling Islamic and cultural values. Second, the ‘urfic-ummatic framework reveals critical diversity: Persian, Palestinian, South Asian, and Egyptian Muslim identities maintain distinct vernacular practices while sharing transnational Islamic bonds. Third, picturebooks achieve dual address through calibrated glossing, paratextual scaffolding, and visual positioning, enabling heritage preservation and cross-cultural education simultaneously. This study demonstrates that contemporary Muslim picturebooks function as sophisticated heritage literacy texts, offering models for authentic multicultural literature across religious traditions.