ABOUT LAMANA PUBLISHING

Building the canon that should have always existed.

The Mission

Lamana Publishing exists for one reason.

Science fiction and fantasy, the genres that build worlds, imagine futures, and ask what civilization could become, have been shaped for decades by a single cultural perspective. European kingdoms. Western mythological frameworks. Heroes who look, think, and act in one particular way.

Meanwhile, one of the most extraordinary civilizations in human history has been almost entirely absent from the genre's shelves.

The Islamic Golden Age produced the world's greatest astronomers, mathematicians, physicians, and philosophers. Muslim scholars mapped the stars while others weren't looking up. They preserved knowledge, while the rest of the world was burning. They built cities of extraordinary beauty, learning, and sophistication. They gave the modern world algebra, optics, surgery, and the foundations of science itself.

And they have given speculative fiction almost nothing.

Lamana Publishing was founded to change that.

We are the first publishing imprint dedicated specifically to Islamic science fiction and fantasy—stories that draw from the full depth of Muslim history, culture, theology, and imagination. Not as decoration. Not as a backdrop but as the foundation of the world itself.

This is not a niche. This is a movement.

The Founder

Lamana Ali is a Muslim author, nonprofit fundraiser, and Corona, Queens, native who immigrated to the United States from Chad at the age of ten. He attended John Bowne High School in Flushing and spent the next thirty years building a career in sales, business development, and nonprofit fundraising while carrying a lifelong dream quietly in the background.

Books were the one constant in an unstable childhood. They were the refuge, the education, and the imagination that no circumstance could take away. The dream of writing one never disappeared. It simply waited.

In 2025, that waiting ended.

Inspired by Steven Pressfield's The War of Art and driven by the conviction that the story he had been carrying for decades deserved to exist, Ali sat down and wrote The Celestial Ashes, a 625-page epic science fantasy rooted in the true history of the fall of the last Moorish empire in Granada, Spain. He wrote it at midnight after his six-year-old daughter went to sleep. He edited it himself when professional editors quoted him prices he couldn't afford. He published it on faith that the right readers would find it.

They did.

The Celestial Ashes debuted with five stars on both Amazon and Goodreads and reached number 22 on Amazon's African myth and legend bestseller list, without a single dollar of paid marketing.

It is Lamana Publishing's founding title. And it is the beginning of something much larger.

The First Book

The Celestial Ashes is an epic science fantasy rooted in a chapter of history most of the world has forgotten.

In 711 AD, Black North African Muslims — the Moors — crossed into Europe and built one of the most sophisticated civilizations the medieval world had ever seen. They built libraries when Europe had none. They mapped the heavens, preserved ancient knowledge, and pioneered sciences that would shape the modern world. And then they fell, not to a superior enemy, but to themselves. To pride, ego, and a family that could not hold together when it mattered most.

Lamana Ali read that story at fifteen years old. It never left him.

The Celestial Ashes takes that history and lifts it into a far-future science fantasy setting, floating cities, ancient forbidden weapons, political betrayal, and a forbidden love story that ignites a war, and asks one question: what if that civilization had kept going? What could it have become?

Every piece of technology in the world of the novel traces back to a real Islamic scientific invention. The culture, the architecture, the political structures, the faith, all of it is built from the inside of a tradition that the genre has almost entirely ignored. This is not a book that uses Islamic aesthetics as decoration. It is a world built from the bones of our civilization outward.

The story follows Prince Zayn al-Zaryan, a Muslim protagonist navigating political betrayal, forbidden love, exile, and the impossible choice between justice and mercy, through a narrative that draws on the Oedipus arc, the tragedy of Al-Andalus, and the Islamic principle that surrender to what Allah allows is not weakness but the only path through.

It is, at its heart, a story about power and what it costs. About the love you carry into destruction. About whether cycles of violence can be broken by mercy, or whether mercy itself is just another form of loss.

For readers of Frank Herbert's Dune, George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, and Brandon Sanderson's The Stormlight Archive—but told from a world the genre has never visited.

Available now on Amazon in paperback and digital formats.

The Why

When Lamana Ali went to categorize The Celestial Ashes on Amazon, he discovered something that stopped him cold.

Amazon has fiction categories for Christian literature, Jewish literature, and religious fiction of virtually every tradition.

There is no category for Islamic fiction.

Not one. On the world's largest book platform. For the faith of over 2 billion people, nearly a quarter of the entire human population.

That absence is not an accident. It is a symptom of something much larger. Muslim readers have been consumers of other people's imaginations for too long. Muslim writers have been building worlds in isolation, without the infrastructure, the community, or the visibility that their work deserves.

Lamana Publishing exists to build that infrastructure. To create that community. To demand that visibility.

Because the history is there. The theology is there. The cosmology and the culture and the centuries of extraordinary human achievement are all there, waiting to be transformed into the speculative fiction our community has never had and the wider world has never seen.

We are not filling a gap.

We are building a canon.

The How

Lamana Publishing will champion Islamic speculative fiction through three commitments:

Publishing — Producing and promoting works of science fiction and fantasy rooted in Islamic history, culture, and tradition. Beginning with The Celestial Ashes and expanding to amplify Muslim voices across the full spectrum of speculative fiction.

Advocacy — Actively pushing for the recognition and categorization of Islamic fiction as a legitimate and commercially significant genre. Working with platforms, institutions, and media to ensure that Muslim speculative fiction has the visibility and infrastructure it deserves.

Community — Building the readership, the critical conversation, and the creative network that Islamic speculative fiction needs to thrive. Spotlighting Muslim authors who are already doing this work. Creating space for the writers who are coming next.

This is a long game. The canon we are building will not be complete in a year or a decade. But every book matters. Every reader matters. Every Muslim child who picks up a science fiction novel and finds a world that looks like theirs, that matters more than we can measure.

Lamana Publishing is here for all of it.

The Vision

We believe the Muslim speculative fiction movement is not coming.

It is here.

The readers are there. The hunger is there. The history and the theology and the imagination that could power a thousand extraordinary worlds—it has always been there.

What was missing was a home for it.

Welcome to Lamana Publishing.

The shelf exists now.