The Qur’an calls the story of Yūsuf “the best of stories” (Qur’an 12:3) — and then tells it the way only it can: in scenes. A shirt, a well, a caravan, a dream of eleven stars. We wanted anyone to be able to walk those scenes on a lunch break. So we retold the lives of all twenty-five prophets named in the Qur’an as swipe-through story decks — 638 cards, every scene anchored to the ayah it comes from.
The shape of a deck
Each prophet’s life is a sequence of cards, in narrative order. The front of a card sets the scene — “The brothers return with a bloodied shirt.” Flip it, and you get the story told in warm, plain prose; the verse itself in Arabic with a translation you can listen to, recited; and where an authentic hadith genuinely adds something — the Zamzam story with Hājar (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 3364), the day of ʿĀshūrāʾ at the sea (Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī 2004) — it appears with its collection and number. Every deck ends the same way: a card we call the measure of the man, a short character study of what made this prophet who he was.
Three rules we refused to break
Only what the sources say. The temptation in prophet storytelling is to fill gaps with folklore — the Isrāʾīliyyāt, embellishments that traveled from older traditions into popular retellings. We don’t. If the Qur’an is brief about a prophet, his deck is brief: Dhū l-Kifl gets a handful of cards, honestly, rather than twenty padded ones. Yūsuf, whose sūrah tells his whole life, gets 74 scenes. The length of a deck is a claim about the sources, and we keep that claim true.
Plain language. Early drafts said things like “seven ears of grain.” Readers stumbled — ears? So we rewrote: seven stalks of wheat, and the dream explained the way you’d explain it to a friend: seven fat cows and seven green stalks are seven years of plenty; the lean and the dry are the famine that follows. Scripture deserves reverence; explanation deserves clarity. The two are not enemies.
Every scene stands alone. You might open the app at scene 40. So no card leans on the one before it — each names its people and its moment fresh. It’s harder to write, and far kinder to read.
The length of a deck is a claim about the sources — a short honest deck beats a long embellished one.
The Seerah, in eight chapters
The life of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ needed more room than one deck. It became eight: birth and childhood, the young man they called al-Amīn, the first revelation, the years of persecution, the Night Journey and the Hijra, Madinah and the battles, the treaties and the opening of Makkah, and the farewell — 131 cards from the year of the elephant to “this day I have perfected for you your religion” (Qur’an 5:3).
Why cards and not a book?
Because a card fits inside a real day. Two minutes in a queue is one scene of Mūsā at the burning bush — complete, sourced, with the verse recited in your ears. The format borrows what the best microlearning apps discovered about attention and puts it in service of something older and better. There’s a Card of the Day, per-deck progress, and a gentle streak — the same philosophy as everything Awwab makes: small, consistent, and honest about its sources.
All 37 decks — the prophets, the 99 Names of God, the guidance duʿās, and the signs of God in creation — are free in your browser. Start with Yūsuf. It really is the best of stories.