Analysis of the short story 'Trapped'

The text “Trapped” is about a little Muslim girl named Amina. In school, all the students have drawn a picture of Jesus and Mary. The teacher looks at Amina's picture and discovers that she has painted their faces brown. Amina was told to take her picture home and show it to her parents instead of hanging it on the wall like all the other children. She shows it to her mother, Mrs Iqbal, and she taught Amina that it’s forbidden for Muslims to draw the prophet from Nazareth. When Amina comes back to school the next day, the teacher asks her to draw the exact same drawing again. Even though she's been told not to, she ends up doing it anyway.

"The setting" in the story is important for the whole understanding/meaning of the text. It takes place in England, and thus Amina is also "alone" about being Muslim since the English are typically not Muslims. So, if the story were going on in Pakistan e.g., Amina would not be "different" and then the setting in the story would not be important. Some of the story also takes place in school, where you can also sense that Amina is different, since she chooses to paint the faces of Jesus and Mary brown, ”The white faces of twenty-four Mary’s looked down from the wall on the brown face of Amina's picture” (p. 2, l. 18-19). It shows that Amina stands out from the crowd and therefore "the setting" is very important.