Book Review: Stories of the prophets for children

Author: Shams Hijazi
Illustrator: Tiba Abdullah
Category: Children’s Islamic books

What to expect:

This book contains simplified bedtime stories of the Prophets of Allah (peace and blessings be on all of them). Each story is summarized in a few pages with illustrations that visualizes the stories of the prophets.

The review:

I bought this book for my son so that he could learn about the prophets. What I liked about this book is the simple Arabic language used. What is more, the stories correctly proportioned to use as a bedtime stories.

First of all, I fell in love with the illustrations, they are funny, simple and entertaining yet rich in color as well. Such lively illustrations can spark the imagination of the child and keeps them captivated to keep looking at the book and keep wanting to get back to it. It also captures the personalities of the disbelievers (kuf’far), the transformation of an environment from sunny to rain, giving the proper atmosphere to the narration of each section.

The story itself is short and very simplified. However, it was sometimes a bit too simplified that I missed some important details of the Prophets’ stories. Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is a good thing, because you do not want the child to learn everything in one go. It gives them an opportunity to establish the basics in the Arabic language, and it gives them a basic story of the prophets. That’s why I think this book is a good choice if your goal is to introduce the Prophets of Allah (peace and blessings be upon them) to your child for the first time. When they get older, they will then read another book which would then provide more details to the story, and giving them a different perspective to these events.

I highly recommend this book for children who can understand Arabic or they are starting to learn Arabic and want a short story with easy vocabulary. It is even suitable to read to toddlers because of the rich illustrations which can capture their attention, and it would give a good opportunity to provide some meaningful input in Arabic for them.

I bought it from Al-Kawthar Bookstore