ĪQĀN (10) Vol. 05, No. 02, Jun-2023 1 eISSN: 2617-3336 pISSN: 2617-3700 BEYOND THE BINARY: EXPLORING LITERARY REPRESENTATION OF ISLAMIC DIVERSITY THROUGH IRSHAD ABDULKADIR’S PRODIGAL Azher Khan 1 Dr. Hafiz Abid Masood 2 <drasmaislam@gmail.com> Department of English, International Islamic University, Islamabad Received: 02-May-23 Accepted: 10-Aug-23 Online: 12-Aug-23 KEYWORDS Social platform, positive impacts, negative impacts, students, academic performance. ABSTRACT This article focuses on the struggle between various facets of Islam within the contemporary Pakistani community as represented in the novel ‘Prodigal’ (2019) by Irshad Abdulkadir. The novel chronicles the journey of two young Muslim men on their separate yet parallel paths to discover their faith and find the right means ‘to serve Allah’. The text challenges the Western stereotyping of Islam being a rigid and static entity that dissociates with changing socio-cultural norms of modern societies. The present study is qualitative in its nature and examines the selected text to see how the novel depicts various characters that represent the intellectual trends of Islamic thought in the contemporary Muslim world. Also, the study investigates how the author has woven different Islamic worldviews into the fabric of the novel’s plot and character development. The analysis reveals that the text remarkably brings forth the positive image of Islam and pleads a strong case to advocate for the world’s most misunderstood religion. The study also foregrounds the inadequacy of the categorization of Muslims and offers a critique of the taxonomies often proposed by the Western scholars to divide Islam into different varieties. Introduction In the age of modern technology, when people are attached to tangible goods, services, and consumption, it is challenging to persuade them to return to an invisible realm, such as Deein and Aakherat. Modern IT equipment may be a more effective tool for Islamic Da'wah in this strategy. social, when traditional methods of communication were slow and expensive, modern media such as Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Skype, Linkdln, Googl+, Tumblr, Instagram, WhatsApp, IMO, Telegram, etc. have