How to judge a prophet story retelling

A retelling of a prophet's story can be full of warmth and still get something wrong. The stories are old and the sources are specific, and once a line of dialogue gets added for colour, it tends to stay in the next ten retellings too, because it reads well and nobody checks where it came from.

That's the main thing worth watching for. Not whether a story is exciting, but whether it puts words in a prophet's mouth that no source actually records.

Where invented dialogue sneaks in

Most of it isn't dramatic. A narrator fills a quiet moment with a feeling: what a prophet must have thought, standing at a door, waiting for an answer. It reads well. It just isn't something anyone recorded, and once it's told as fact rather than as the storyteller's own guess, a child has no way to tell history apart from the gap that got filled in to keep the story moving. The retelling doesn't announce which parts are which, so the invented line and the recorded one land in a child's memory with the same weight.

The same goes for a conversation given word for word when the original account only says that words were exchanged, or a side character invented to carry a scene. None of that makes a story untrue in spirit. It does mean a child grows up remembering a detail as history that was never in the account at all, and years later, correcting it is harder than teaching it right the first time would have been.

A version aimed at young children often adds the most, since a bare account can feel thin for a bedtime story and a narrator reaches for something to fill the space. That instinct isn't the problem. Doing it quietly, without ever saying this part is ours, is.

What a sound retelling does instead

A retelling can still be gripping without inventing. It can say what the sources agree happened, be honest when scholars differ on a detail, and let a narrator's own voice carry the warmth instead of borrowing it from a line a prophet never said. Tone of voice, pacing and the choice of which real moments to linger on do most of the work that invented dialogue is usually reached for instead.

Age matters too. A version for a four-year-old leaves more out, but what stays in still has to be accurate, not simplified into something that didn't happen. A shorter story that keeps strictly to the sources is a better choice for a young child than a longer one padded out with scenes nobody recorded, even if the longer one sounds more complete on the surface.

Our standard sets out exactly what we check for, including this. The first prophet stories we've listed are Safar Productions' Islamic Bedtime Stories, short episodes on Prophet Adam, Prophet Ibrahim and Prophet Nuh, peace be upon them, made for ages 3–6.

We're building the catalogue carefully rather than quickly, so there aren't many yet. If you've found a retelling you trust, we'd like to hear about it.