Muslim Bios & Memoirs

From the life of Muhammad to the faith journeys of modern American Muslims,
these bios shed light on the call of Allah around the world.

Selected by The New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of the Year Years in the making-the definitive biography of the legendary black activist. Of the great figure in twentieth-century American history perhaps none is more complex and controversial than Malcolm X. Constantly rewriting his...

Who was Muhammad? What do we know historically, and does that differ from how he is seen by his followers and venerated today? Find out....

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists...

A young man’s moving story of war, friendship, and hope in which he recounts his harrowing escape from a brutal civil war in Yemen with the help of a daring plan engineered on social media by a small group of interfaith activists in the West. Born in the Old City of Sana’a, Yemen, to a pair...

Muhammad's was a life of almost unparalleled historical importance, yet for all the iconic power of his name, the intensely dramatic story of the prophet of Islam is not well known. In The First Muslim, Lesley Hazleton brings him vibrantly to life. Drawing on early eyewitness sources and on...

Little X chronicles the multigenerational experience of Tate's family, who broke from the traditional Black church in the 1950s to join the radical Nation of Islam....

Meet Osamah Sami: a schemer, a dreamer and a madcap antihero of spectacular proportions whose terrible life choices keep leading to cataclysmic consequences....

Part memoir and part how-not-to guide, The Wrong End of the Table is everything you wanted to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as “Tattoos and Other National Security Risks,” “You Can’t Blame Everything on Your Period," and many more....

Named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most important innovators of the century, Tariq Ramadan is a leading Muslim scholar....

Explore Thomas Merton’s encounter with Islam and its mystical tradition of Sufism with one of Catholicism’s great scholars....

In this groundbreaking intellectual biography, Robert Irwin provides the definitive account of the life and thought of the medieval Arab genius who wrote the Muqaddima....

Muhammad (peace be upon him) is the Messenger of Allah, and those who are with him, are severe against the disbelievers, and merciful among themselves....

A Palestinian-American activist recalls his adolescence in Gaza during the Second Intifada, and how he made a strong commitment to peace in the face of devastating brutality in this moving, candid, and transformative memoir that reminds us of the importance of looking beyond prejudice, anger...

Professor A. K. John, alias al-Dayrani is the best known and most distinguished among the pupils of Scholar Sheikho....

Born into the factious world of war-torn Arabia, Muhammad's life is a gripping and inspiring story of one man's tireless fight for unity and peace....

In this timely, provocative, and uplifting journey, the bestselling author of Walking the Bible searches for the man at the heart of the world's three monotheistic religions -- and today's deadliest conflicts. At a moment when the world is asking, “Can the religions get along?” one figure...