Once a month we have a Throwback Thursday. This piece originally ran on November 30, 2013. We hope you enjoy it.
This series was compiled by Saniyasnain Khan and is available from Good Word Books, Amazon, and all the usual places one may buy books. If you are Australian and particularly from Melbourne, I recommend purchasing at IBC http://ibcshopping.com.au because they are a friendly bunch. The proprietor helped me sort through what I needed on and off until an hour after closing time, when he surely had better things to do! That kind of customer service deserves to attract business.
Unfortunately, this series is not sold in order. I thought this was very silly, but was comforted when the chap in the book shop said the Sura (chapter) and Ayat (verse) numbers were included in the footnotes so it wouldn’t be a huge job to sort them out. Murphy’s Law of Homeschooling struck when I got home and found that less than half of the books are drawn from one chapter only, so putting them in order was going to require significant collaboration between my non-Muslim self, Wikipedia, http://quran.com and a few others. Plus, the Quran makes no attempt towards chronological order. Who knew? (Apart from the billion or two Muslims out there!)
So, here is the series put into Quranic order to the best of my ability, just in case someone else ever needs it:
The Morals of Believers
Life Begins
Allah Made Them All
The First Man
The Builder of the Kabah
Uzayr’s Donkey
Ramadan and the Quran
How to Pray Salat
The People of the Book
The Two Brothers
A Unique Miracle
How Ibrahim Came to Know Allah?
Allah’s Best Friend
The Ark of Nuh
The Prophet Hud and the Storm
The Prophet Shuayb and the Earthquake
The King’s Magicians
The Pious Man and His Sons
The Prophet Yusuf and the King’s Dream
The Travels of the Prophet Ibrahim
The Sleepers in the Cave
The Story of Two Gardens
The Wise Man and the Prophet Musa
The Iron Wall
The Old Man’s Prayer
The Miraculous Baby
Allah Speaks to the Prophet Musa
The Prophet King
The Most Patient Man
The Light of Allah
The Ant’s Panic
The Queen and the Bird
The Treasure House
Luqman’s Advice to His Sons
Love Your Parents
The Gardens of Saba
The Angel’s Prayer
The Brave Boy
Tale of a Fish
The Travellers Prayer
The Rivers of Milk and Honey
The Honoured Guests
The Prophet and the Blind Man
You might ask why a Pagan would spend so much money on a series of Quran stories, particularly when she has most of them at home in a book called ‘Bible Stories for Children,’ retained from her upbringing. The chap in the Muslim shop did! As I explained to him, all these stories are important for cultural literacy, and it is my hope that my kids will read the Jewish, Christian and Muslim versions and *notice* they are all the same stories. That might not sound like an in-depth analytical exercise, but I only have very small children at present! What I didn’t tell him, because he didn’t require the long version of my education philosophy (especially an hour after the shop had closed), is that I think an education is supposed to teach us about people and their motivations. After all, we spend our whole lives with and/or avoiding people! Religion is one of the largest forces that shapes the way people view and interact with the world and its other inhabitants, so a lot of my time and “pocket money” will be devoted to the subject.
Rose-Marie was one of those enthusiastic planners who began researching when she was pregnant with her first. She wanted to homeschool because it sounded like an affordable adventure, then she met her kids personally…They live on a hill in rural southern Australia without enough solar panels and like it there.
