During the month of Ramadan it would be mind opening for Jewish and Muslim believers to read “The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World.”

One reviewer notes that wishing to better understand Islam, a Christian friend once asked US-based Turkish writer, intellectual and journalist Mustafa Akyol to recommend an English translation of the Quran for him to read.

A few weeks later, the friend continued his conversation with Akyol. He had some thoughts and had been grappling with some passages he found troublesome — yet one thing struck him as the biggest surprise of all.

“I was expecting to read about the life of Muhammad, (like the four Gospels of the New Testament are centered on Jesus) but instead I read about the life of Moses more than anything else,” the friend wrote.

Moses is mentioned 137 times in the Quran, while Prophet Muhammad is mentioned (by name) just four times. That certainly is not just by chance, as Akyol points out in his new book, “The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World.”

The biblical characters and narrative were, in fact, intentionally central to the new faith Muhammad was cultivating and promoting across Arabia and beyond some 14 centuries ago.

Moses and his story were emulated by Muhammad, and the parallels are not hard to spot. Both men started as unlikely leaders — Moses, slow of speech, and Muhammad illiterate — and yet both ultimately led massively successful migratory, nation-building and military efforts alongside the establishment of new religious-legal systems: Jewish halacha and Islamic sharia.

In the book, Akyol examines further theological parallels, yet also explores historical encounters between the Jewish and Islamic worlds. The author finds these interactions especially important in the current geopolitical climate, in which many forget that for much of history, the Judeo-Islamic tradition was much more peaceful, fruitful and coherent than the Judeo-Christian one.

Some of those encounters — such as the mass migration of exiled Iberian Jews into Muslim lands in the 15th and 16th centuries — are well-known. Others — like Jews celebrating the initial Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, which facilitated some 1,400 years of nearly uninterrupted Jewish settlement in the Holy City after Roman Christians had long barred them from residing there — are less well-known.

Akyol doesn’t overlook some of the darker historical periods in Jewish-Muslim relations, such as the persecution and forced conversions under the Almohad Caliphate, though he treats these as largely the exception rather than the rule, and I as a Rabbi agree.