The Construction of Pious Children in Serial Salman Dan Hamzah

Abstract

Children’s literature is often used as a medium for teaching values, for example religious values, in order to shape children’s character based on the understanding or ideology of certain groups. Through religious-based children’s literature, the figure of a religious ideal child was created and called a pious child. This example is applied by Salafi Islamic groups in Indonesia. The group that bases its teachings from the Salaf creates Islamic children’s book genre called ”Sunna children’s book”. The method used in this article is library-based qualitative research. Studies of pious character in European minority Muslim children’s literature have been widely carried out by Green-Oldendorf (2011), Shavit (2016) and Janson (2017), while studies of pious children in Indonesian contexts have only been done little, including this article. Textual study on the construction of pious children character is carried out according to the concept of ideal child in children’s literature by Purbani (2009), children book illustration and visual by Nodelman (2004), and pious Muslim child and childhood by research approach (Hendra-Priadi, 2019 and Scourfield et. al., 2013). The result of the research shows that pious children are represented through the main character who is very diligent in worshiping, behaving well, and obedient to parents. In addition, the construction of pious children in Serial Salman dan Hamzah is based on Salafi ideology concept of tarbiyah (education) that textually refers to the Quran and Hadith.