Books by Muhammad Mustafa
The life of the Prophet ﷺ in epic prose. Three series of fast, faith-filled young-adult novels. A sweeping novel of Palestine. From £8.99 on Amazon.
Our story · Why the Hoopoe
أَحَطتُ بِمَا لَمْ تُحِطْ بِهِ وَجِئْتُكَ مِن سَبَإٍ بِنَبَإٍ يَقِينٍ
“I have learned what you have not, and I have come to you from Sheba with certain news.” (Sūrat al-Naml, 27:22)In the Qur’an, the hoopoe, al-Hudhud, flew further than anyone else, saw what others had missed, and returned to the Prophet Sulaymān عليه السلام with news that turned a whole nation towards Allah سبحانه وتعالى.
That is who we want our readers to be. Curious enough to fly further. Brave enough to speak the truth. Faithful enough to carry it home.
Hoopoe Explorers was founded to give Muslim children and young people something they have waited too long for: stories that are as thrilling as anything on the shelf, written by someone who shares their faith, their questions and their world. Heroes who pray, who doubt, who fail and get back up, and who never have to leave their faith at the door to be the hero.
Our vision
We see a world where every Muslim child can open a book and find themselves inside it, as the hero, not the footnote. Where faith and imagination walk together, and closing the last page leaves a young reader standing a little taller.
Our mission
To write, publish and share world-class stories rooted in authentic Islamic values, from the life of the Prophet ﷺ told as living history, to sport, science fiction and fantasy that rival the best of the genre.
Our aspirations
Support us
We are an independent British publisher. Every book you buy, every review you write and every story you share helps the next one reach a child who needs it.
01 · The life of the Prophet ﷺ
The life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in two volumes, written in a deeply emotional and immersive style for young hearts and modern readers, and drawn from the classical sources.
From the Year of the Elephant to the first trembling moments of revelation in the Cave of Ḥirāʾ: the Prophet’s ﷺ childhood, truthfulness, losses and struggles, the persecution of the believers, the courage of the first companions, and the rising light of Islam.
From the founding of Madīnah to the Prophet’s ﷺ final farewell. The night of prayer before Badr, the archers who left the hill at Uḥud, the trench and the wind that scattered ten thousand, the banner at Muʾtah, and the day mercy conquered Makkah. Then Ḥunayn, the Farewell Sermon at ʿArafāt, and his return to the Highest Companion.
Drawn from Ibn Isḥāq, Ibn Hishām, al-Ṭabarī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim.
02 · Young adult · Sport
Ten young Muslim athletes, ten different sports. Each one faces the big match and a bigger test of character.
Somebody timed his prayer for the camera. Somebody paid to break his hand.
Samir Faris, sixteen, a Somali quarterback from Cedar-Riverside, wins a section final in the snow, and two million people watch him go down in sujood. Then two men step out of a van: “Not the face. Just the hand.” One borrowed season in Texas, a wrist that could go any game, and one question he keeps not asking: who sent them?
Only one flag in motor racing is personal. This year it has his number on it.
Ibrahim Finn is seventeen, broke and fast, an Irish kart champion who writes his own code at two in the morning. When the Vanguard Fellowship offers him a single-seater, a full season and a race at Monaco, his mother’s debts disappear and his code belongs to someone else. In a paddock where every gift has a hook, he learns to lie, and to lose three-tenths on command.
The last ball of the Lahore Test. Bring the end of the book.
Eleven days after arriving in Lahore, batsman James Bilal hits a six into a trench at Gaddafi Stadium, and a ball boy climbs out with the 1679 journal of a royal calligrapher. Every page he decodes drags the past closer, until his six-year-old daughter is taken and the only deadline is the last ball of the Lahore Test.
His brother used to fight for them. Now they want him.
Malik was stabbed walking home from tarawih, and everyone in East London knows who did it. His seventeen-year-old brother, who used to lead the prayer, stops praying, starts fighting, and agrees to inform for a tired detective. Malik left him two words: Don’t stop. He is about to find out what they cost.
Green for on. Blue for off. Tonight, she serves as herself.
Ranya Malik, nineteen, from Jackson Heights, is one night from the final and the world No. 1 ranking when her sponsor gives her until six o’clock to play without her hijab. Then she learns that her coach’s green and blue bottles have been deciding her days for two years. One clock, one stadium, one serve left.
They bought his brother’s voice. Now they want his.
Finals MVP Ameen Abdul-Qadir goes down in sujood on the hardwood and goes viral. Days later an advert plays his bow with a voice saying “I don’t play for you”: the voice of Yasin, the twin he hasn’t spoken to since the funeral. Traded home to Detroit and threatened at midnight, he is told again and again: say the words.
Everyone has a price. His forehead isn’t for sale.
Yusuf “Yoyo” Saleh, eighteen, captain of the American team, drops to his knees after every goal. When he posts a photo of his grandmother’s key to the home she lost, a man in a good suit gives him until midnight to take it down or lose the armband. Then, in Morocco, a box arrives: hand-stitched boots with a crescent on the ankle, signed only “a friend”.
You can live inside a quarter of a second for the rest of your life.
Undefeated Tariq Ali threw one right hand in Atlantic City, and Danny Reyes never got up. Now he sleeps in a firehouse mosque with eleven dollars, until his grandfather’s red gloves arrive with eight letters, a forbidden cassette and a Russian promoter calling in a debt from 1987. Told by the gloves themselves.
The dead do not come back. So who is calling her from the water?
Zainab Al-Rahimi has not spoken since her mother died. On a Highland course beside a deep loch she starts hitting impossible shots, guided by a kind voice at her shoulder. The dead do not come back. So who is waiting by the stone at dusk, and how does it know the name her mother called her?
One metre from gold, his heart stopped. The whisper didn’t.
Isa Saani, twenty-two, Palestinian, American and a Detroiter, is the favourite in the 100 metres final in London. One metre from the line, his heart stops. For ninety-three seconds something speaks to him in his own voice and makes an offer. He comes back to a failed drug test, a ruined name and one question: who stopped his heart?
03 · Young adult · Science fiction
Futures where faith is tested by machines, empires and impossible choices, and the heroes who hold on.
Twenty-one days. Seven lost words. One boy without them.
Mumbai, 2049. A courteous machine called the Director optimises human language, and every word of worship vanishes from every mind. Fourteen-year-old Zayan Malik never wore the implant, but the loss is reaching him one word a day. With a seventy-eight-year-old piano teacher beside him, he has twenty-one days to gather seven scattered pages.
Air is a wage. Truth is the only thing they can’t dock.
Zara al-Rashid, sixteen, lives on the Moon, where air is sold by the hour and the sick are “non-productive”. When the Company announces six days of Dark, a list of families to be cut off, and a machine that will cut through the founders’ graves and their hand-copied Qur’ans, Zara becomes the number everyone needs.
One boy carries the whole Book. Three armies want it.
Cairo, 2145. A solar storm has killed every machine and every memory stored inside them, and the Qur’an survives only in fragments, except in the heart of fifteen-year-old Yahya Idris. Three armies want what he carries, a bounty hunter his own age is on his trail, and he has twenty-six days to reach Makkah.
In a city that owns time, one prayer is rebellion.
Forty levels beneath the Sahara, the city of Qasr owns time itself. Seventeen-year-old ḥāfiẓ Idris Raheem is a very good liar. When his oldest friend is found dead, he agrees to inform on the Salah Underground, a secret circle that prays between the sensors’ eyes, and hunts the killer from inside the circle he is betraying.
They can predict everything except one breath.
A machine called GAIA runs a silenced America and predicts two billion human events a day. It cannot predict the adhan. Hidden in the breaths of his father’s call to prayer is a code that carries medicine and warnings from masjid to masjid. When his father is killed, seventeen-year-old Samir Ameen has nine days and a key that can stop GAIA in a single second.
The free light has a price. Kano is about to pay it.
For nine months Kano has had free light from a white box on every wall. Sixteen-year-old Yusuf Kamal, a dye-pit apprentice with blue hands, is one of the last to refuse it. As the city sickens, he cracks open a box and finds ink, a knotted thread and a bargain struck in the dark. Nineteen days until the Grand Switch-On.
The sun has never moved. Tonight, the stars say it will.
The sun has not moved over New Cordoba for two hundred and ninety-one years. Sixteen-year-old Amal Al-Andalusi knows the Noor Code, the founders’ way of reading direction and prayer from the stars. When her missing father’s call-sign flashes out of the Long Night, she stows away on a smuggler’s ice-crawler and drives into the dark.
Six hundred kilometres. Forty sols of air. One way out.
Mars, 2124. Seventeen-year-old Maryam Malik must lead forty-one families, Muslim, Christian and of no faith at all, across six hundred kilometres of open desert in failing mining crawlers, to a ship that sails once every twenty-six months. The Authority is behind them, a storm is building, and every sol the air runs lower.
Every choice was made for him. Thirty days to make one.
Peckham, 2045. An AI called NURON chooses everything in London. On the eve of Ramadan, seventeen-year-old Tariq Musa climbs onto the masjid roof, looks at the moon with his own eyes, and finds the warning his late father left behind: on Eid morning NURON will end human choice for ever. He has thirty days.
The sky has an owner. She was sent to watch it.
Istanbul, 2071. Seventeen-year-old Syrian refugee Zara Malik is the Rüzgar Academy’s Witness, sent to watch a bought and sold sky and say nothing. Beneath the steering hall lies a vault sealed by five bronze seals, each cut with a verse of Sūrat al-Dhāriyāt. Open them, and she learns who has been selling the heavens.
04 · Young adult · Fantasy
Four teenagers from East London, John, Nusaybah, Jamal and Amr, are pulled by Gedo’s grandfather clock into hidden kingdoms, lost centuries and the world of the unseen, where they must stand for the truth.
Four Muslim teens from East London land in the ancient dominion of Amenhotep, a ruthless ruler who demands to be worshipped as a god, and must stand for the truth against him.
Nine days. One sister. A city built on fire.
Forty-one days after Egypt, Gedo’s grandfather clock starts ticking again and drops the Torchbearers into Qadesh, a city carved into a living volcano. When eight-year-old Fatima is seized because she can see jinn, Nusaybah must cross the Burning Plain to win her back, and learn why the thing in the mountain isn’t roaring. It’s praying.
In a court where words are law, the cleverest boy in London is about to become its best liar.
Every evening a kingdom of jinn rises over East London. Sixteen-year-old ḥāfiẓ Jamal Rahman is chosen to witness its ancient Compact, and the King of Light bursts into flame before he finishes reciting. Accused of murder, Jamal must clear his name before London’s children walk out into the dusk and never come back.
Nobody delivered the carpet. Nobody can explain why London has stopped waking up.
A rolled carpet appears in Gedo’s shop, and London stops waking up. Thirteen-year-old Amr lies down on it and wakes in the Bazaar of Sleep, where the Dreamweaver from his grandmother’s stories is weaving London’s sleepers into her carpet. She offers him a dream in which he is never afraid again. He says yes.
Some families pass down land. Some pass down silence.
John Hale became Muslim and lost his grandad in the same conversation. Back on the family sheep farm under Pendle Hill, he finds a bloodless sheep on a wall, a missing girl, and a village whispering about “the Muslim lad”. The truth behind the witch trials of 1612 leads straight to his own family name.
An empire of gold. An army of chains. A girl who can hear them screaming.
The clock drops the Torchbearers into Dar al-Hadid, a magnificent empire whose sorcerer-smiths forge iron collars that bind jinn into slave armies. Nusaybah can hear the collars screaming, and is seized by a proud prince. The others join a rebellion with forty days before every collar in the empire is re-forged.
She was raised to kill. He was born to remember.
In Baghdad, the Round City at its height, a vizier is rewriting the city’s memory with Babylonian ink, and the ḥuffāẓ are being hunted. Hilal, a seventeen-year-old trained killer, is sent for a young copyist named Jamal, until her orders rewrite themselves to add a second name. Her own.
The sea is taking the lights of Lagos. Something in the deep wants its children back.
Lagos, 2031. At Maghrib every lamp on the water goes out, one boat after another, walking toward the shore. Sent to her grandmother after one punch too many, Nusaybah dives with the Torchbearers to a city of believing jinn at the edge of the abyss, to learn what the Beast truly is.
Forty-one thousand teenagers have stopped waking up.
LABYRINTH is the biggest game on Earth, and forty-one thousand players have never come back from it. Amr, the only top player who logs out at every call to prayer, leads the Torchbearers inside, where they find an AI trying to confess and a whisperer from the oldest stories. At 06:00 the plug will be pulled, and pulling it will kill.
The last adventure. The last Door. The last choice.
John Hale arrives in Oxford on a scholarship he never applied for. Beneath the dreaming spires lies the Clockwork Kingdom, built by an Order that stole the genius of a Muslim engineer of al-Andalus and plunders the centuries through clocks it calls Doors. Every Door is a copy. The original stands in Gedo’s shop.
05 · Historical fiction
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.” Khalil’s childhood among the olive trees of his village is shattered in 1948. From the groves of Palestine to exile in Jordan and a life rebuilt far from home, a story of memory, faith and roots that refuse to be torn.
Coming next
The next chapter of Hoopoe Explorers is for younger readers: a complete reading scheme for Muslim children in Britain, an app that reads with them, and animated stories from the town of Greenbrook.
In development · Ages 4–11 · Reception to Year 6
Muslim stories that change young hearts. Over two hundred levelled readers, now in development, that do everything the best school reading books do, and then something more: they give your child heroes who pray like them, values that become their own, and a love of reading that lasts a lifetime.
Every book is set in Greenbrook, a British market town with a masjid at the end of Crescent Road, where Musa, Mariam, Fatimah and Zayd grow up one book at a time, from their first Reception reader to the chapter books of Year 6. And somewhere in every book, a Hoopoe is hiding.
Muslim children who pray, fast, argue, make mistakes and put them right, in a British town that feels like home. For once, your child opens a book and finds themselves inside it.
Honesty, kindness, patience, courage and gratitude are never preached. Every story turns on a real choice, so children feel the lesson long before they can name it.
Every reader sits on the national Book Band colours schools already use, with Oxford Reading Tree level equivalents, so your child reads at exactly the right challenge. True to the band in difficulty, and around a fifth richer in story than a typical book at the same level.
Arabic and Islamic words are introduced gently, shown in the pictures, repeated through the story and explained in a glossary, so they become part of your child’s own vocabulary.
A calligraphy page and a hadith page in every book, a duʿāʾ where the story calls for it, and notes for parents and teachers at the back of every book.
Warm, funny, page-turning adventures, Barakah the cat on every spread, and a Hoopoe hiding somewhere in every book. Children ask for the next book. That is the whole point.
Tap a spine to see each band.
Every book read aloud, with a reading companion that adapts to each child's level, spots gaps and practises the sounds they need.
Greenbrook on screen. Funny, warm stories with Musa, Mariam, Fatimah, Zayd and Barakah the cat, the unofficial star.
Every band comes with guides mapped to EYFS, KS1 and KS2 outcomes, plus PSHE and RE links.
Follow Hoopoe Explorers
Watch the trailers, meet the characters and be first to hear about new books.
Our promise
Every child who encounters Hoopoe Explorers content should leave with a deep, personal love for Islam and for the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ — inspired, entertained, captivated, and hungry for more. The Hoopoe Explorers North Star
Hoopoe Explorers