Why we made this
Seminaries across the world teach Arabic from Qisas an-Nabiyyin. Every word carries its vowels, the language rises story by story, and the teachers who use it love it. It was written for a room with an ustadh in it. Your child is reading at the kitchen table.
Where it came from
Shaykh Sayyid Abul Hasan Ali al-Hasani an-Nadwi wrote the first volume of Qisas an-Nabiyyin for a child in his own family. He opens the book by explaining why.
I see that you are very fond of stories and tales, as is every child your age … but I am saddened that I see nothing in your hands except tales of cats and dogs, lions and wolves, monkeys and bears. And we are to blame for that, for that is what you find in print. So I decided to write for you, and for children of the Muslims like you, the stories of the Prophets and Messengers in a simple style suited to your age and taste — and so I did.
He blames the adults for printing nothing better. Seventy years later we looked at the same shelf in a different country and reached his conclusion. That is why we made this edition.
Why the book is good
He bound himself to four conditions. They describe how children learn a language better than most of what gets written on the subject now.
1The fewest words, repeated the most
He keeps the vocabulary to a minimum and fixes it by recurrence. A word you meet on one page comes back on the next, and the next. Children read these stories long before they could pass a test on them.
2The language of the Qur'an
The Arabic is Qur'anic. He sets the verses in place, in his own phrase, like the stone in a ring. A child who reads these stories is reading toward the Qur'an.
3Belief taught without a lesson
The narrative carries tawhid, prophethood and the hereafter. He never stops to list them or define them.
4The child never feels taught
He simplifies the stories so nothing lands as a burden. The child takes it in while following the story.
Why we started
Our editor has studied with Shaykh Dr Mohammad Akram Nadwi since 2007. In that time he has heard the Shaykh recommend Qisas an-Nabiyyin to students beginning Arabic, to teachers building a syllabus, and to parents asking where to start. After enough years of that, you sit down and read it yourself.
Writing on how to make progress in Arabic reading, he sets out the order:
Begin with simple, well-written Arabic texts containing short, clear, and eloquent sentences. Progress to short storybooks that use familiar vocabulary and straightforward grammar.
He names Qisas an-Nabiyyin among the books for that stage. Elsewhere he is blunter: keep away from vocabulary lists and grammar books, and read the people who used the language well. Short sentences first, then short stories, raising the level as you go.
You absorb a language from meaning you can follow. That idea shaped every page of this edition.
Shaykh Akram's articles are published at akramnadwi.com. We quote him because his writing shaped this edition. He has not endorsed it.
What was missing
In a madrasa the ustadh teaches this book aloud. He reads, gives the meaning of each new word, corrects the reading, and asks the child to retell the story back. For many students it is their first meeting with Arabic vocabulary, and with translation, which he supplies in the room.
Take the ustadh away and your child can still sound out every word on the page. She will not know what happened in the story.
So we put him on the page.
English underneath
Meaning never has to wait. The Arabic stays whole and the English sits with it, so a parent who does not read Arabic can still sit down and read it together.
Every new word, where it appears
We gloss each word on the page where it first appears. Nobody turns to a glossary at the back.
Every page read aloud
Every page is read aloud, and the line lights up as it is read. Part 2 is read by Maulana Marjan Ahmed; Part 1 uses an AI voice he checked against the text. Pronunciation comes from a voice, the way it always has.
Word families
You meet a root on one page and recognise it on another. That is how Arabic rewards a reader.
A picture on every page
The image holds the meaning while the language is still arriving.
Practice that asks for answers
Short exercises drawn from the page your child has just read. They ask her to produce the language, not point at it.
What is not drawn
Not faceless, not from behind, not in silhouette, shadow or reflection, and not by any substitute figure. Nor do angels. Where a scene is seen through the eyes of Ibrahim (as) you see the night sky, the idol house, the fire, and no part of him.
We give no person in these pages facial features. We settled that before the first drawing and have held it on every page since.
We kept the stories whole. We simplified the language for a young reader and cut no episode for being difficult. Where the story is grave, the picture carries the weight without dwelling on the act.
You will not find عليه السلام printed after a Prophet's name in the book, and that is a decision rather than an oversight.
Shaykh Abul Hasan did not write them, and this edition follows his Arabic exactly. The English sits line for line beneath it so a child can match one to the other, and that matching is how the book teaches. Put words on one side that are not on the other and the correspondence a child relies on breaks.
So it is said here instead, and meant throughout. Wherever a Prophet is named in this book, عليه السلام is intended. Wherever Allah is named, سبحانه وتعالى. The same note is printed inside the book.
Who made it
We generated the illustrations with AI image tools, then revised them against a written standard until they earned their place. We would rather say that here than leave you to wonder. What it took: a character bible fixing how the idols, the buildings and the clothing look from one page to the next. A depiction rule with no exceptions. And a reviewer who kept sending them back.
It took about six months and several different tools, some of which we abandoned after weeks of trying to make them hold a style and a rule at the same time. For every page that made it into the book, more than ten were generated and thrown away. Haneefah, the editor's daughter, holds a diploma in art. She chose what each page shows, then reviewed every generated page against the ones already accepted. In one pass she sent back twenty-two: the style had drifted, some had gone photo-real, some carried speckling the accepted pages did not have. She rejected the batch produced to fix those as well. Every page in this book went through more than one version, and most through many.
The faces took the longest. No person in this book has facial features and no Prophet appears at all, and image generators fight both rules. Page after page came back with a carved face on an idol or eyes on a bystander in the crowd, and went back again. The rule you read about above cost more than any other decision in the book.
Maulana Marjan Ahmed, who translates much of Shaykh Akram's work into Bangla, proofread every line of the Arabic and listened to all fifty recordings against the text, correcting what he found.
Ustadh Akhlaaq Choudry of Al Salam Institute, one of the editor's own Arabic teachers, gave a great deal of his time to checking the text. Other Arabic teachers advised on the typefaces, which sounds like a small matter until you watch a child try to read a fully vowelled line set in the wrong one. Ulema gave their guidance on the illustrations.
Whatever is correct here comes from its sources and its teachers. The mistakes are ours, and we would be grateful to be told of them.