Whenever I tell someone that I’m writing a bilingual 10-min story halaqa stories of sahaba, some say that there are already such books in the market. When I ask if they can share, they don’t come up with any.
I’ve been looking for bilingual (En-Ar) short stories of the Prophet and the companions for over two decades. Why bilingual? bcs I want my kids to be familiar with Arabic and bcs the beauty of seera/sahaba stories are most prominent when quoted verbatim. Why stories of sahaba? bcs their legacy is most inspiring and entertaining for the rest of us.
Following are some examples of story books that are available and that people often refer to, and that are great, yet they fall short of being the go-to-book for the objective of 10-min story halaqa for reasons mentioned below. and not being bilingual is not the primary reason.
- 365 Prophet Muhammad Stories. by Saniyasnain Khan. first, not bilingual, second, its an excellent book but more like info snippets than stories. For soem kids that I tried it on, it was just another textbook. Children are more attracted to stories with a hook, climax and ending, even if short.
See the first page for example:
Compare this with
2. 365 Sahabah Stories, more like stories but still similar to 365 Prophet Muhammad Stories.
3. 101 Seerah Stories and Dua. same as above.
4. 365 stories by bait al-ilm. more story like but then not bilingual and some stories are not new, i.e., they’ve been told over and over in different languages. Also not from seera or sahaba in particualr. For example, the first story about the emperor looking for a successor and giving seeds to children, I can imagine my kid shouting out ‘I already know this story’.
5. صور من حياة الصحابة , صور من حياة الصحابيات, صور من حياة التابعين, by Rafat Pasha. WONDERFUL storytelling BUT not in english. Other Arabic books such as رجال حول الرسول are long winded, and too info-loaded.
6. Many wonderful Urdu storybooks such as 365 kahaniya are wonderful and my kids enjoyed them more than other books bcs of better storytelling and novelty, yet, again, they were not bilingual n not strictly sahaba stories.
Bottomline: There are good books in the market but if we want to have a short story halaqa where we can read a short story in both arabic n english/urdu, discuss its morals and applications, all in 10 mins, then its hard to find any such book in the market. And if there is none, can we write one?
