Exploring the Characteristics of the Ideal Citizen in Qur’anic Narratives and Their Representation in Children’s Literature

Introduction
Citizenship encompasses more than legal rights; it also involves awareness of one’s own and others’ rights, reciprocal duties, public participation, and civic virtues (Giddens, 2005; Samiei, 2018). It is influenced by the relationship between rights and obligations, responsibility toward the community, and the integration of ethics, faith, and social action within an Islamic framework. An indigenous conception of the ideal citizen can be bolstered by Qur'anic narratives, which depict the social consequences of conduct, loyalty, responsibility, conflict, judgment, and cooperation. Likewise, children’s literature has the potential to indirectly convey social values through the combination of words and images and narrative (Bruner, 1996). The problem was that this social capacity of Qur’anic narratives had not been organized into a systematic framework for evaluating children’s literature. Consequently, the investigation identified the characteristics of ideal-citizens in Qur'anic narratives and analyzed their depiction in children’s storybooks. It posed the following question: To what extent and in what manner are the characteristics that define the ideal citizen in Qur'anic narratives verbally and visually represented in children’s literature?
Theoretical Foundations
Iranian research has investigated citizenship education through the lens of family models, Qur’anic foundations, social responsibility, and social-skills instruction. Dahani et al. (2017) emphasized lawfulness and altruism; Fatehi et al. (2019) argued for a Qur’an-based Islamic model; and Salehi Motaahed et al. (2020) investigated the incorporation of social responsibility into educational materials. The potential of Qur'anic stories to enhance the social skills of children was demonstrated by Soleimannejad and Soudi (2014). Islamic religious education has been associated with identity, participation, and social cohesion in international research (Yağdı, 2025). Additionally, Muslim children's literature has been examined in terms of inclusion, diversity, and social unity (Panjwani, 2020; Formen, 2025). Yet prior work generally isolates the foundations of citizenship, Qur’anic stories, or children’s literature. This study introduces a framework that is based on interpretation and is derived from Qur'anic narratives. It is then applied to the visual and verbal content of children's books.
Research Methodology & Framework
The inductive and deductive phases of this qualitative investigation were complementary. The initial unit of analysis was a verse or cluster of verses that represented a narrative event. Narratives were incorporated when they addressed the social repercussions of behavior, justice, interaction, reciprocal rights and duties, collective decisions, or responsibility toward others. The verses were analyzed using Persian translations and Tafsir al-Mizan, Tafsir-e Nemuneh, and Tafsir-e Nur after each narrative was delimited by its context (Tabataba’i, 1995; Makarem Shirazi, 1995; Qara’ati, 2009). For each category, the verse, narrative setting, exegetical evidence, and analytical remark were documented. Purposive selection of sixty-five Qur’anic narratives was implemented. Positively reformulated negative characteristics without altering their exegetical implications, synonymous categories were merged, repetitions were removed, and non-generalizable role-specific instances were excluded. Meaning units were iteratively converted into provisional categories. This resulted in the formation of 14 primary categories and 39 subcategories. In the second stage, the categories established an a priori scheme for deductive content analysis of 20 storybooks published by the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults for age groups B and C (Neuendorf, 2002). Titles with comparatively strong readership and sales were purposively selected. The recording units consisted of independently meaningful scenes or visual elements and sentences or narrative segments that conveyed meaning. Explicit and implicit instances were coded, and category frequencies, verbal and visual shares, and distributions across knowledge, attitude, and skill were calculated. The coding was validated by researcher triangulation prior to the qualitative and quantitative analyzes.
Research Findings
Upon analyzing Qur'anic narratives, 14 categories were identified: justice orientation, social participation, public monitoring and oversight, openness, self-management, commitment, virtue orientation, assertiveness, empathy-oriented disposition, social responsibility, commitment to legitimate authority, freedom of thought, sufficiency


orientation, and truth orientation. Collectively, these categories consisted of 39 subcategories. The framework was represented by 353 instances in the children’s books. The most prevalent category was empathy-oriented disposition, which accounted for 74 instances, or approximately 21% of the total. Social participation and social responsibility followed, with 60 and 42 instances, respectively. The frequency of public monitoring and oversight was the lowest, with only five instances, or approximately 1.4%. A total of 312 instances (approximately 88.4%) were identified in the verbal text, while only 41 (approximately 11.6%) were identified in the illustrations. Classification by learning domain revealed that 240 instances (68%) were related to skills, 85 (24%) to attitudes, and 28 (8%) to knowledge. Representation was therefore uneven across categories, between verbal and visual modes, and among the three learning domains.
Conclusion & Discussion
The selection of books appears to prioritize affective and interpersonal values and behaviors that are easily dramatized, as evidenced by the prominence of empathy, participation, and responsibility. This accords with the experiential character of narrative and its capacity to model conduct. However, the inadequate depiction of public supervision and certain aspects of justice suggests that the more critical aspects of social life are still underdeveloped. The dominance of skills over attitudes and knowledge likewise shows that the books prioritize action over conceptual instruction. Although consistent with literature’s indirect pedagogy, skills and attitudes may remain situational without a minimum level of conceptual understanding. The limited contribution of illustrations also reveals an underuse of images’ educational potential for age groups B and C. In general, the correlation between Qur'anic citizenship components and children's literature is selective rather than systematic. The framework can be of assistance to authors, illustrators, curriculum coordinators, and cultural policymakers in the more deliberate representation of justice, public responsibility, and truth orientation, as well as in the balancing of knowledge, attitudes, and skills. However, the investigation assessed the prevalence of components rather than their impact on readers. Its interpretive, exploratory framework requires expert validation and testing across other publishers and age groups. Future multimodal and intervention research should investigate the manner in which children interpret these representations and the impact they have on their knowledge, attitudes, and behavior regarding citizenship.