Looking for Muslim fiction authors? We are a cozy mystery site, so we start where our readers start: with the detectives. A cozy mystery with a Muslim woman as the sleuth is still rare, and we want to find every one of them. Below you will find the Muslim mystery writers we follow, then the famous novelists, fantasy, romance and young adult authors that readers ask about most. Every book on this page is fiction written by Muslim authors or built around Muslim characters and lived experiences.
Muslim Mystery Writers: Cozy and Crime Fiction With Muslim Detectives
These are the authors a mystery reader should know first. Only one of them writes a true cozy. The others are darker crime fiction, but each puts faith, family and community at the heart of the story.
Uzma Jalaluddin: Detective Aunty Investigates
Uzma Jalaluddin is a Canadian author, a high school teacher and a columnist for the Toronto Star. Her first mystery, Detective Aunty (2025), is the cozy we recommend above every other book on this page. Kausar Khan is a 57-year-old South Asian Muslim widow. Then her daughter is arrested for the murder of her landlord. Kausar goes back to her old Toronto suburb, the Golden Crescent, to find the real killer.
The second book, Moonlight Murder, came out in May 2026. Kausar is the aunty everyone underestimates, and she learns more over a cup of chai than the police do. Read the whole story in our Detective Aunty Investigates series guide.
Ausma Zehanat Khan: Esa Khattak and Blackwater Falls
Ausma Zehanat Khan was born in Britain to Pakistani parents and grew up in Canada. She holds a PhD in international human rights law. Her debut novel, The Unquiet Dead (2015), won the Barry Award and the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel. It opens the series about Esa Khattak, a Muslim detective in Toronto, and his partner Rachel Getty. A man falls to his death from the Scarborough Bluffs, and the case leads back to the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.
The Esa Khattak mysteries run to five novels and a novella. Her newer Blackwater Falls books follow Detective Inaya Rahman in Colorado. These are police procedurals, not cozies, but they are the strongest Muslim crime fiction we know.
Parker Bilal: The Makana Mysteries in Cairo
Parker Bilal is the pen name of the British-Sudanese novelist Jamal Mahjoub. His detective, Makana, was a police inspector in Khartoum before he had to flee Sudan. Now he lives on a houseboat on the Nile and works as a private investigator. The six Makana mysteries start with The Golden Scales (2012) and move toward the 2011 revolution. Corruption, politics and the refugee experience run through every book.
Laury Silvers: The Sufi Mysteries
Laury Silvers is a scholar of Sufism, and her Sufi Mysteries Quartet is historical crime fiction set in Baghdad in the early tenth century. The amateur sleuth Zaytuna and her twin brother Tein investigate murders, and each book follows one stage of the Sufi path. Start with The Lover. It is the best introduction to Islam in fiction form that we have found.
Chris Culver: Ash Rashid, if You Like It Darker
Chris Culver’s The Abbey (2011) introduced Ash Rashid, a practicing Muslim and a homicide detective in Indianapolis. He struggles with sobriety and with the violence of the job. This is a hard-boiled thriller series, far from the cozy side of the shelf.
Who Are the Most Famous Muslim Fiction Authors? From Mahfouz to The Kite Runner
If you want literary fiction before you pick up a mystery, these names come up on every list:
- Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian storyteller of the Cairo Trilogy, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.
- Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-American author of The Kite Runner (2003) and A Thousand Splendid Suns (2007). Amir, Soraya, Mariam and Laila are some of the best-known Muslim characters in modern fiction.
- Mohsin Hamid, born in Lahore, wrote Exit West. In it Saeed and Nadia flee a city on the brink of civil war through magic doors.
- Laila Lalami, the Moroccan-American author of The Moor’s Account and The Other Americans.
- Kamila Shamsie, born in Karachi, wrote Home Fire, a modern Antigone about a British Pakistani family.
- Nadifa Mohamed, the British Somali author of The Fortune Men.
Hosseini is the author most readers meet first. Mahfouz is the one most critics would name.
Popular Contemporary Books by Muslim Authors: From A Place for Us to The Bad Muslim Discount
These contemporary books cover family, faith, first love and immigration to the United States and Britain:
- A Place for Us by Fatima Farheen Mirza (2018): an Indian American Muslim family meets again at a wedding.
- The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed M. Masood (2021): Anvar leaves Pakistan for California, and Safwa escapes Iraq. Nobody in this funny novel is a perfect Muslim, and nobody tries to be.
- American Dervish (2012), the debut novel of the Pakistani American writer Ayad Akhtar, about a boy in Milwaukee and his mother’s friend.
- Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar (2024): an Iranian American poet, newly sober and orphaned, searches for a family secret.
- The Map of Salt and Stars by Zeyn Joukhadar (2018): a Syrian American girl, Nour, flees war with her family. Her story runs beside a twelfth-century apprentice to a mapmaker, and her mother draws hand-painted maps.
These contemporary novels show how wide the field is. Syrian, Somali, Palestinian, Iranian and Pakistani families all have their writers now.
Notable Muslim Fantasy Authors: Hafsah Faizal, We Hunt the Flame and More
Fantasy is where many young readers find themselves on the page. Hafsah Faizal’s We Hunt the Flame (2019) is set in a world inspired by ancient Arabia. Zafira hunts in a cursed forest disguised as a man, and Nasir is the sultan’s assassin. Both must face an ancient evil and their own fate.
Sabaa Tahir wrote the bestselling An Ember in the Ashes series. Ausma Zehanat Khan, our crime writer above, also wrote the four-book Khorasan Archives. G. Willow Wilson wrote Alif the Unseen and co-created Kamala Khan, the teen hero of the Ms. Marvel comics. For dystopian fiction, try Omar El Akkad’s American War, set during a second American civil war.
Historical Fiction by Muslim Authors
Historical fiction is a small shelf here, but a rich one:
- The Moor’s Account by Laila Lalami tells the story of a Moroccan slave on a sixteenth-century Spanish expedition to Florida.
- The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed follows Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor wrongly hanged for murder in Cardiff in 1952.
- A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam is set during the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971.
- The Architect’s Apprentice by Elif Shafak takes place in Ottoman Istanbul.
- Laury Silvers’ Sufi Mysteries, above, bring tenth-century Baghdad to life.
Romance Novels by Muslim Authors: Ayesha at Last and Other Love Stories
Before she turned to crime, Uzma Jalaluddin was known for romantic comedy. Ayesha at Last (2019) retells Pride and Prejudice in a Toronto Muslim community. In Hana Khan Carries On (2021), Hana runs a family halal restaurant and a podcast. Soniah Kamal’s Unmarriageable moves Austen to Pakistan.
S.K. Ali’s Love from A to Z is a young adult love story about Zayneb and Adam. Many of these books deal with arranged marriage, family pressure and love on your own terms.
Muslim Authors Who Write for Young Adults and Children
Muslim teens and children have more books about their lives than ever before. Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage (2022) moves between Lahore and Juniper, California. It won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Tahir was the first Muslim and Pakistani American woman to win in that category.
Zoulfa Katouh’s As Long as the Lemon Trees Grow (2022) follows Salama, a young pharmacy student in Syria. She treats the wounded in a hospital in Homs and helps her pregnant sister-in-law, Layla. In You Think You Know Me (2023), Ayaan Mohamud writes about Hanan, a Somali British teenager facing Islamophobia at school. It is a coming-of-age story about displacement, self-discovery and the fight for freedom to be yourself.
For younger children, look for Saadia Faruqi’s Yasmin books and Hena Khan’s Amina’s Voice. The Proudest Blue, by Ibtihaj Muhammad with S.K. Ali, is a picture book about a girl’s first day wearing a hijab. Once Upon an Eid is a story collection about Eid, the celebration at the end of Ramadan.
Award-Winning Books by Muslim Authors, From the Nobel to the National Book Award
Several of the authors on this page have won multiple awards:
- Nobel Prize in Literature: Naguib Mahfouz (1988).
- Pulitzer Prize for Drama: Ayad Akhtar for Disgraced (2013).
- National Book Award: Sabaa Tahir for All My Rage (2022).
- National Book Award finalists: Laila Lalami for The Other Americans and Kaveh Akbar for Martyr!.
- Pulitzer Prize finalist: The Moor’s Account.
- Booker Prize shortlist: Exit West and The Fortune Men.
- Women’s Prize for Fiction: Kamila Shamsie for Home Fire (2018).
- Stonewall Book Award: Zeyn Joukhadar for The Thirty Names of Night, about a closeted Syrian American trans boy.
- Crime fiction: The Unquiet Dead won the Barry and Arthur Ellis awards for best first novel.
Memoir, Poetry and Graphic Novels
Not every great book by a Muslim author is a novel. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is a graphic memoir of an Iranian girlhood during the revolution. The Ms. Marvel comics are among the best-known graphic novels with a Muslim woman as the hero. Kaveh Akbar published two poetry collections before Martyr!, starting with Calling a Wolf a Wolf.
Where to Find New Releases by Muslim Authors
Goodreads has a Muslim author shelf with quotes and videos tagged by readers, and new reader lists every year. Public libraries publish staff lists of fiction by Muslim authors, and publishers such as Penguin Random House keep reading lists of contemporary novels. For mysteries, follow the authors above: Uzma Jalaluddin and Ausma Zehanat Khan both announce new books on their own sites.
We read every new cozy mystery with a Muslim sleuth that we can find. When a new one comes out, it goes on this page.
Muslim Fiction Books We Have Reviewed
Our reviews of these books will appear in the list below as we publish them. For more categories, browse all our cozy mystery genres.
Frequently Asked Questions About Muslim Fiction Authors
Is there a cozy mystery with a Muslim main character?
Yes. Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin is the best example. Kausar Khan is a Muslim widow and grandmother who solves murders in Toronto. The second book is Moonlight Murder.
Who is the best Muslim mystery writer?
For cozy readers, Uzma Jalaluddin. For police procedurals, Ausma Zehanat Khan. For a private eye in Cairo, Parker Bilal.
Are there halal or clean mysteries for Muslim readers?
Cozy mysteries are clean by nature: no graphic violence, little swearing and no explicit scenes. Detective Aunty fits well. The darker crime novels on this page are not clean reads.
Who are some famous female Muslim authors?
Laila Lalami, Kamila Shamsie, Nadifa Mohamed, Sabaa Tahir, Hafsah Faizal, Fatima Farheen Mirza, Uzma Jalaluddin and Ausma Zehanat Khan.