Children's Books from Ruqaya's Bookshelf: Is It Time to Demand More from Muslim Children's Literature?

• Basirah the Basketballer says Insha'Allah by Hafsah Dabiri (more links)
• Zaid and the Gigantic Cloud by Helal Musleh
• The Great Hair Exchange by Asmaa Hussein (founder of Ruqaya's Bookshelf)
• Not Too Little to Make a Difference by Lela Usama Goldsmith
• Mr. Gamal's Gratitude Glasses by Asmaa Hussein
• Nusaiba and the 5th Grade Bullies by Asmaa Hussein
• Pepperoni, Pitches (and Other Problems) by Shifa Saltagi Safadi
• Spell It Like S-A-M-A-R by Shifa Saltagi Safadi

Ruqaya's Bookshelf's ordering and fulfillment process worked well. The production value in terms of binding, paper, copyediting, illustrations, colors and cover finish are good. Many of the texts use British orthography, so be prepared to help your young readers with that.

My two favorite stories were Basirah the Basketballer Says Insha'Allah and Zaid and the Gigantic Cloud. In Basirah, Hafsah Dabiri's story shows how a child might develop a faulty understanding of an religious concept and then learn from her parents a more correct understanding. In Zaid, Helal Musleh and the illustrator compel the readers to interpret a metaphor to understand the moral lesson of the story. I prefer that over the more frequent "club the reader over the head with the moral lesson."

Seventeen years ago, I'd written Criteria for Evaluating Muslim Children's Media. While I've written many things over the years which I now regard as cringeworthy, for the most part I thought this one was on point and reflected the state of Muslim children's media at the time. 

If these 8 books are reflective of the current state of Muslim children's media, it may be time to make a more demanding set of criteria. As I'm typing these words, I'm not sure how to express what I think is missing, but I'll share some criticisms of these books here. Take these criticisms with a grain of salt. I'm not a specialist in child education, and I'm really too old to be taken seriously talking about children's books. :-) And they are still likely to be worth purchasing for personal and institutional use.

Many of these books have depictions of bullying, yet they seem formulaic. The illustrator typically illustrates the bullies as stereotypical-Northern Europeans. Pepperoni by Shifa Saltagi Safadi has the more complex "bully" story, but it still falls short.

I don't understand the ubiquity of hijabs in illustrations and in some story lines. Do we expect or even want Muslim girls at twelve and thirteen and fourteen year old to wear hijab? The stories are made for 5-6 year olds, so why do the books frequently depict the female Muslim protaganists, with whom the readers are presumably to identify, as wearers of hijab?

Some of these books have "pick yourself up from your bootstrap" and other positive-attitude, self-help type themes. And there's nothing particularly wrong with that, and I even liked it in Zaid and the Gigantic Cloud. But such self-help stories can sometimes cross the line into perseverance porn when the story never makes clear that there are social solutions to individuals' hardships. In the story Not Too Little to Make a Difference, poverty prevents a family from sending the female protagonist to school. The protagonist tries to earn the money for school fees through the informal economy. She fails, but, in the course of doing so, she attracts the attention of a donor who does pay her fees and allows her to attend school. Instead of presenting child labor as a solution, why isn't the story asking why some societies choose not to provide universal free education? Why is not the action that "makes a difference" canvassing to create a labor union to improve the wages of workers and get families out of poverty?

And, just to throw this out there, at what age should children be exposed to tragedy in their literature? What if the child can't go to school? What if the sick relative dies? What if the bully doesn't get her comeuppance?

Perhaps I'm writing these mild criticisms on these for-the-most-part quality books because of a general frustration I'm feeling with the quality of Muslim life in North America. We just seem to be settling for superficial, formulaic, bourgeois religion, not religion which comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.