One of our teacher’s mother abandoned Fiction in her teenage years because she read a hadith that said something about leaving vain speech. As someone whose work involves selling narratives, and who has read and heard from The Bookseller on the importance of fiction for building imagination, creativity and even empathy, it sounded a little too… rigid.
So it did surprise me when I was watching The Three Body Problem (I bought the book -a fiction kwa kwa- but never got around to read it), that the one thing that caused the aliens to abandon their initial plan to work together with the humans is when they realised that the stories read to them from the book of fairy tales were actually fiction. ie. lies. They just could not understand that all these while, the stories they assumed were real were in fact from the imagination, ie, not real, and therefore, to them, lies.
I guess we humans are the only species capable of using the imagination, of bringing about something entirely new in our minds, by piecing together parts of our memories, knowledge, experiences, etc.
What does Islam say about fiction? Something to one day discover inshaAllah.