Operationalising Islamic Value Principles in Malay Fiction: A Passage-Level Analysis of Abdullah Hussain’s Imam

This article analyses Abdullah Hussain’s Imam (1995) using Najīb al-Kīlānī’s Principle Two of Islamic literature—commitment to sound Islamic values—as an operational lens. This principle is operationalized into five textual marker-families: (i) tawḥīd & teleology; (ii) insān as khalīfah/amanah; (iii) adab & wasatiyyah; (iv) shūrā & procedural justice; and (v) family iḥsān. Through directed qualitative textual analysis with a prespecified codebook, 1–3-paragraph passages are purposively sampled in sermon, deliberation, domestic, and crisis scenes; Malay quotations are accompanied by concise translations and proverbial meanings are crosschecked with PRPM. Findings show that when markers co-occur (e.g., shūrā + adab in speaking; wasatiyyah + proverbial closure), normative stance becomes perceptible, credible, and memorable. Negative evidence—lush description without value-markers—clarifies the boundary: aesthetic “colour” alone seldom yields commitment. The study contributes a passage-scale operational framework for assessing the accuracy of Islamic worldview (tasawwur) in Malay-Islamic fiction, with implications for pedagogy (rubrics of adab in speaking & consultative deliberation) and daʿwah communication (ethos of satr al-ʿayb, procedural fairness).

Islamic worldview; Najīb al-Kīlānī

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