An Original Investigation into the Literary Representation of Islam in Northern Nigerian Anglophone and Indigenous Language Fiction

Islam as a lived cultural and spiritual tradition has generated a significant but undertheorised body of literary representation in Northern Nigerian Anglophone and Hausa fiction, and a systematic theoretical investigation of how Islam is represented, performed, and contested in this literature represents an important original contribution to both Islamic literary studies and Nigerian Comparative Literature. This study conducted an original theoretical and empirical investigation into the literary representation of Islam in Northern Nigerian fiction from 1960 to the present, examining works in both English and Hausa. A comparative religion and literature methodology drawing on Islamic literary theory, postcolonial cultural studies, and Hausa literary scholarship was employed. Primary corpus analysis covered 30 literary works from authors in the North West and North East geopolitical zones, including Hausa fiction by Balaraba Ramat Yakubu and Ibrahim Sheme, and English fiction by Elnathan John and Abubakar Adam Ibrahim. The comparative analysis examined how Islam is represented differently in Hausa-language fiction for indigenous audiences and in Anglophone fiction for international audiences, identifying systematic differences in the treatment of Islamic practice, gender, and political authority across the two modes. The original Islamic Literary Representation Framework proposes five theoretical constructs: the insider Islamic narrator, the secular observer, feminist Islamic critique, political Islam narration, and cosmological embedding. Expert review by 20 scholars confirmed the framework's original contribution to Northern Nigerian literary studies and recommended adoption in Comparative Literature courses at Bayero University Kano and Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto.