Book: The Messengers And The Messages, Umar S. al-Ashqar

The fourth of eight in the Islamic Creed Series (previous reviews here). This time, the author covers both the Messengers and Books in one volume, one part for each.

Pretty strange, considering that they're usually considered as separate articles of faith. But still, Al-Ashqar presents the topic in a consistent way, talking about The Message as an abstract quality of Messengers rather than a material book.

Unfortunately, the book itself seems to be the driest of the series so far. In fact, I had to take a break from it since I was beginning to lose interest a few chapters after the half way point. I didn't feel that much was said in the 300-plus pages, there was a lot of labouring and repetition and, in my opinion, TMATM could have been much shorter . On the positive side the topic did provide the opportunity to present some basic seerah (stories of The Prophet) and history from the lives of the other prophets.

As part of the range it is a required read, if only for completeness. As a reference it's ace, but as a book it disappoints, especially when compared to its sibling volumes.