Islamic History for Kids: The Battle of Badr by Qasim Riaz

📚 BOOK REVIEW 📚

Title: Islamic History for Kids: The Battle of Badr

Author: Qasim Riaz

Illustrator: N/A

Publisher: Ghazi Production @ghaziproduction

Age: 7 and up

Rating: 8/10 🌟

Summary:

Zahra hides behind baba as she is being chased by her brother, Zain, with a toy sword. This incident starts an important discussion between baba and the kids about the battle of Badr. Baba kindly explains what led up to the battle, the fear of the Muslims, the great miracle and the end result.

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Lessons:

This story is multilayered. It describes the key points of the Battle of Badr, which is the main purpose of the book and along the way it references Qur'anic ayat related to it. In addition, it slightly touches upon the character of the Prophet (s.a.w.s.), his belief and trust in Allah and his humbleness in consulting his close companions in important matters. The story is written well and age appropriate for kids 7 and up, it's not cumbersome in detailing the delicate scenes which is great. I really love the idea of this concept. When we teach our children, we tend to focus mainly on basic foundations of Islam, stories of the prophets and manners and ethics. This is the first book in this series, and I am really curious what their future books will teach.

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The hurdle that I can't seem to get over is the illustrations. There is a disclaimer stating that 'The characters in this book are entirely fictional...and resemblance to actual persons is entirely coincidental.' However, I feel that the actual illustrations are not in line the statement above. For example, Hamza is described to have worn an ostrich feather as a symbol, and the illustrations include a character with a feather on his turban (swipe to see). Furthermore, I am very torn specifically with the depiction of the angels. I have read this to my son a couple of times and each time he asked me "Is this what the angels really look like?" While we try to teach our kids we do not depict and draw prophets, companions and even angels, when kids read this book I don't think they would be able to help themselves but to have these images embedded in their mind.

There is so much potential for this amazing project and I hope the publisher would take this note into serious consideration for their future books. In that case, the Islamic schools as well as masjids would greatly benefit from these important stories that happened in the history of Islam.

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Sep 8/2019