document ref: RB-001
date: July 2026
location: London, United Kingdom
publisher's note
these books look simple. they are not.
behind each twenty four page story is a long stretch of reading in two directions at once, the Quran and its tafsir on one side, and how young children actually learn on the other. nothing on the page is there by accident. the age of the child in the story, the length of the words, the question at the end, the amount of quiet white space around a single picture, all of it is chosen.
the years from about two to seven are when a child first tries on who they are. they hear a word like kind, or brave, or grateful, and they quietly decide whether it belongs to them. and they take that word most readily from a character their own age who they love. so our heroes are a girl of five and a boy of seven, children your child's size, who notice and choose and do things for themselves, never children things are simply done to.
a moral added at the end breaks the spell, and a child stops believing it. young children take on what they feel from inside a story, not what they are told at the close of one. so the lesson is always lived. the seed the child waters really grows. the tray that is shared really comes back full. the meaning arrives as a feeling, and a feeling is what stays.
researchers who study family stories found something quietly powerful. children who feel part of a larger, ongoing story, one with a grandmother and a history and a place they belong, carry more confidence and more resilience when life gets hard. so Rutab is built as one family, one home, one neighbourhood, growing across the whole collection. your child is not reading separate books. they are growing up inside a world, and held by it.
each story is written to be read aloud in one unhurried bedtime, about four to six minutes. every line is tested out loud, the way the best picture book writers test theirs, and any line you would stumble over is rewritten until it runs clean. each page ends on a small open moment so your child wants to turn it, and each book carries one gentle refrain they will start saying before you do.
soft watercolour, one clear image on a page of quiet white. a young child's eye needs one thing to rest on, not a busy scene to search. the light is always warm. there is never anything to fear. beauty is not decoration here, it is part of the teaching, because a book a child finds beautiful is a book they ask for again, and again is where the learning lives.
and underneath all of it, one promise we never break. every lesson is true to the surah it comes from, and every story leaves your child a little more certain that they are loved by Allah.
that is the whole point. everything else is built to carry it gently.
Respectfully submitted,
Rutab Books
Founder & Publisher
LL.B (Hons), Mother