الشهادة والعدل: الفاعلية الأخلاقية للشباب المسلم الأمريكي في رواية النيران الجوفاء لسميرة أحمد

الملخص

Focusing on Samira Ahmed’s Hollow Fires, this study examines how the novel’s narration of witness towards justice transforms the YA form into one of ethics via the Islamic values of shahāda (truthful attestation), ʿadl (fair weighing), amānah (custodial accuracy), and ṣabr (patient discernment). This goes against the post-9/11 criticism which analyses Muslim-based YA by looking at the elements of trauma or multiculturalism whilst ignoring ethical narratives. In this study, a YA Islamic Narrative-Ethics model is applied to Hollow Fires to produce analytic and pedagogical tools that can be replicated. The framework integrates classical Islamic virtue philosophy (Miskawayh; al-Ghazālī), maqāṣid teleology (al-Shāṭibī; Ibn ʿĀshūr; Kamali), ethical narratology (Phelan), YA cognition/ethics (Nikolajeva), testimony studies (Bland & Gannon), and American-Muslim critiques of misrecognition (Alsultany; Aziz; Hilal; Abdul Khabeer). This study follows a qualitative interpretive protocol to show how virtue cues operate through narrative devices, how the text positions its readers through spectatorship and answerable hearing, how a maqāṣid check shapes its use of evidence, and how American-Muslim scholarship informs the overall analysis. It argues that dossier documentarity acts as shahāda, that polyphony creates a moral audience grounded in amānah and ṣabr, and that youth parrhesia is oriented toward ʿadl, encouraging readers to uphold the preservation of life and dignity. Building on these insights, the study proposes a four-step model and a hands-on pedagogical toolkit entailing evidence journals, witness statements, triangulation drills, and chain-of-custody exercises, offering both a framework for virtue-bearing form in criticism and a model of civic witness that challenges “simplified complex representations”.