What are the 5 Pillars of Islam by Nawal Mohamoud

📚 What are the 5 Pillars of Islam 📚

Author: Nawal Mohamoud

Illustrator: Yuliana Makhroyani

Publisher: Self-Published

Age: 5-10

Islamic Content: 5 Pillars

Concerns: See the full review

Summary:

Grandma visits Ameenah and when it's time for prayer, they pray together. This is when Ameena asks her grandmother 'Why do we pray?' The grandmother proceeds to explain the 5 pillars of Islam.

Review:

I honestly don't know where to begin with this book. Anytime I search on Amazon for any Muslim books, this book is one of the 1st ones to pop up. It has a cute cover and the colour tones pull you in. Then when I saw that it has 95 global ratings and had an average of 4.7 stars, I convinced myself to purchase it. This rating is exactly why I have been too furious with this purchase and I am going to try my best to tame my words for this review.

The entire book is an overtly preachy conversation between grandmother and Ameenah. Ameenah is a Muslim child with Muslim parents and yet she happens to be clueless about prayer and asks her wise grandmother why Muslims pray. (which she actually never answers). She says we pray because the prayer is part of our 5 pillars and of course Ameenah asks what those are because she doesn't know. All this doesn't happen until page 11! So up to page 11 is a bunch of unnecessary scenes with text and pictures that serve no purpose to the story.

I am not a literature expert so I think I am flexible when it comes to the quality of literature as long as the Islamic content is solid. But neither are. The answer to why we pray did not satisfy me. Even the pillars are explained in very textbook like, an unnatural way to have a conversation. There's run on sentences, capitalizations of random words in the text, there are misspelled words, misused commas.

This is a book that has nearly 100 reviews with 85% 5stars. So I want to know, who is rating these books on Amazon?

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