Teach Your Children To Love The Prophet

About the translator

Abdalhaqq Bewley: Shaykh Abdalhaqq Bewley accepted Islam in 1968 and spent several years in Morocco studying Islam. Since that time he has worked with Shaykh Dr. Abdalqadir as-Sufi on the establishment of Islam and Muslim communities, which has led to periods living and teaching in Nigeria, the United States, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Spain, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom. He is the author of Islam, Its Basic Practices and Beliefs, Zakat: Raising a Fallen Pillar, The Four Madhhabs of Islam, The Natural Form of Man, and The Islamic Will: A Practical Guide, among other works. In collaboration with his wife, the renowned Arabic translator Aisha Bewley, he has been responsible for The Noble Qur'an: A New Rendering of its Meaning in English, Al-Muwatta of Imam Malik, and Muhammad: the Messenger of Allah, being the ash-Shifa of Qadi Iyad. He has also contributed to the translation of Tafsir al-Qurtubi and edited works including The Four Imams by Muhammad Abu Zahra. Shaykh Abdalhaqq currently resides in Norwich where he serves as Rector of the Muslim Faculty of Advanced Studies.

About the editors

Aisha Bewley: Aisha Bewley (b. 1948 CE) is one of the most prolific and respected translators of classical Arabic Islamic literature into English. Born in the United States, she earned a BA in French and an MA in Near Eastern languages at the University of California, Berkeley, and undertook further study at the American University in Cairo. She embraced Islam in 1968 and has since devoted more than four decades to rendering the texts of the Islamic tradition into clear, accessible English. Her best-known work is The Noble Qur'an, a translation of the meanings of the Qur'an produced with her husband, Abdalhaqq Bewley, and first published in 1999. Among her landmark translations are the Muwatta' of Imam Malik ibn Anas (1989), a foundational early collection of hadith and Maliki fiqh, and the multi-volume Tafsir of al-Qurtubi (2003 onward). Her wider output spans creed, law, and Prophetic biography, including abridgements and renderings of works such as Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya's writing on the soul after death and classical descriptions of the noble character and appearance of the Prophet, peace be upon him. WorldCat records her as author or translator of dozens of works across many editions, and in 2023 she was named Muslim Woman of the Year by The Muslim 500, which recognizes the world's most influential Muslims. Her translations are valued for fidelity to the Arabic and readable English, and remain in steady use among English-speaking students of the tradition.

Muhammad Isa Waley: Muhammad Isa Waley is a British scholar of Islamic manuscripts and Sufi literature, best known for a long curatorial career at one of the world's great repositories of Islamic texts. For some forty-five years he served as Curator for Persian and Turkish, beginning at the British Museum and continuing at the British Library in London. He earned his doctorate on the poetry of Jalal al-Din Rumi, and his scholarly interests center on two areas: the classical verse and prose literature of Islamic spirituality in Persian, Arabic, and Turkish, and the paleography, codicology, illumination, and cataloging of manuscripts in Arabic script. His published work reflects both strands. As editor he oversaw the English Tafsir al-Jalalayn and Imam al-Nawawi's Kitab al-Adhkar (The Book of Remembrances), and he contributed to Islamic Codicology: An Introduction to the Study of Manuscripts in Arabic Script. As translator he rendered Jami's forty-hadith collection Chihil Kalima and the Mawlid of Imam al-Barzanji into English. He has also lectured widely on the study and importance of Islamic manuscripts for research into Islamic literature and culture. His more recent A Treasury of Rumi gathers selections from the poet who has occupied him since his earliest research, bringing a lifetime of textual scholarship to a wider readership.