ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the religious disciplining of childhood is narratively and visually staged in the children's literature produced by one of the dominant publishing houses of this market since the 1970s. It demonstrates how particular aesthetic and moral codes inform the literature, relating both to traditional Islamic norms of figurative representation and to the needs and opportunities of the British minority situation. The chapter deals with religious children's literature only in this narrow sense, and the concept of Islamic children's literature will be reserved for pedagogical-literary products with the explicit religio-ideological purpose of preserving and adjusting young religious identity in accordance with the needs of European minority existence. It focuses on some reflections about how this literary-religious disciplining, through the creative staging of visual norms and narrated virtues, relate to some characteristics of the genre of children's literature as discussed by Nodelman, and specifically to the notion of "pleasure".
