Faced with the action packed movies and colourful accessories from Disney and Pixar, what stories can you tell your pre-schooler instead? How do you help maintain Tawakkul and Iman of your family in the face of the trials faced by Muslims in China and Yemen?
When you pick up a school history book, you find chapters dedicated to the different historical ages, explanations of early civilizations, details of the rise and fall of empires, and our fight to break the shackles of colonialism. Yet, the earliest and the best of humankind are missing from this narrative.
The Quran, of course, holds the key to these Ahsanul Qasas (the best stories). The Hadeeths provide further details and explanations about the prophets and their nations. In addition, the Hadeeth mention other nations and people, from whom we can learn lessons.
It is a time consuming and exhaustive task to compile and correlate relevant Ayats and sound Hadeeths for such explanations and family Halaqah times. Reliable, easy to read and comprehend books are essential for such purposes. Stories from the Hadeeth by Mohammad Zakariya Iqbal is an invaluable addition to the family bookshelf.
Translated from Urdu into English by Rafique Abdur Rahman, this book is so well organized that you need only to read from it for initiating family discussions. Divided into five chapters, you will find in this book Hadeeths detailing the stories of the prophets, miracles, worldly rewards of righteous deeds, incidents of the pious that help strengthen faith and finally warnings about the destruction of people who disobeyed. Each Hadeeth is printed in its original Arabic text, followed by a translation. A more detailed explanation with relevant Aayats and Hadeeths follows, and this leads to the concluding analysis of the Hadeeth in focus, written succinctly in bullet form.
For a layman, this concluding section of each Hadeeth in focus is the most useful. A number of rules of Fiqh can be derived from a single Hadeeth, and this section helps in such analysis. For example, is it permissible to accept a gift from a tyrant or an infidel? From the Hadith about Prophet Ibrahim and Sarah’s encounter with the cruel king, we learn it is permissible, because the king finally gave Sarah a slave-girl Hajar, whom she then gifted to Ibrahim (as).
Since this book is a translation, the flow of the English language may not always be very smooth and some typographical errors may be noticed. Nevertheless, given a dearth of such books in Urdu and English, this collection and explanation of fifty-three Hadeeths is a veritable treasure trove that helps us learn from the collective history of humankind.
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