COMPARATIVE-TYPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF RELIGIOUS-ETHICAL DISCOURSE IN AMERICAN DIASPORA PROSE: THE CASE OF KHALED HOSSEINI AND TAMIM ANSARY

Abstract

This article offers a comparative-typological analysis of religious-ethical discourse in the English-language prose of two American writers, Khaled Hosseini and Tamim Ansary. Drawing on Hosseini’s three major novels – The Kite Runner, A Thousand Splendid Suns, and And the Mountains Echoed alongside Ansary’s historical narrative Destiny Disrupted, the study identifies a recurrent typology of religious-ethical concerns that runs across both fictional and non-fictional modes of diaspora writing: individual guilt and atonement, communal honor codes rooted in Pashtun tradition, gendered endurance and piety, and a providential-historical consciousness that reframes Islamic civilization for an Anglophone readership. The analysis combines discourse-analytic and linguopoetic methods, examining how lexical borrowings from Persian, Pashto, and Arabic, together with recurring rhetorical structures such as proverb citation, confessional retrospection, and direct address, encode ethical meaning at the level of language. The article argues that Hosseini and Ansary, despite writing in different genres, construct a convergent ethical vocabulary that mediates between an inherited Islamic moral framework and the individualist redemption narrative characteristic of American literary tradition, a synthesis that positions their work squarely within the scope of contemporary American literature.