in several quarters of fragrant Damascus. Let us hear him record the event in his own History (16/457) under the happenings of the year 766 AH:
“Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī was completed in the Umayyad Mosque and elsewhere in a number of places. Six sessions were held each day and read before Shaykh ʿImād al-Dīn Ibn Kathīr. The first was in the Hisham Mosque at dawn before sunrise; the second beneath the Eagle Dome (Qubbat al-Niṣr); the third in the Nūrī School; after midday the fourth in the Tankiz Mosque; then in the ʿAzziyyah School; then in the kiosk belonging to the mother-in-law, Lady Asmāʾ, daughter of the vizier Ibn al-Salʿūs, until the call to the ʿAṣr prayer. After ʿAṣr it was read in the residence of the King of the Amirs, Amīr ʿAlī, in the Qassāʿīn quarter, until shortly before sunset. Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim was meanwhile being read in the Ḥanbalī miḥrāb inside Bāb al-Ziyārah, after the Eagle Dome and before the Nūrī School. Allah is the One Whom we ask; He is the Helper, the One who grants facilitation and ease. This same arrangement of readings took place in several other venues—the houses of amirs and elsewhere—and nothing like it had ever been witnessed in previous years. So praise and favor belong to Allah alone.”
His stance toward the Israelite reports (Isrāʾīliyyāt)
Abū al-Fidāʾ Ibn Kathīr devoted attention to the Isrāʾīliyyāt and spelled out his approach to them at the beginning of both his Tafsīr and his History. Drawing on the prophetic ḥadith, “Convey from me even a single verse; relate reports from the Children of Israel without embarrassment; and whoever deliberately lies about me, let him take his seat in the Fire,” he divided the Israelite narratives into three categories:
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Reports that are confirmed by the Qur’an and the Sunnah and for which they bear witness; we have no need of these, being already “self-sufficient with what lies in our own sources.”
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Reports that the Qur’an and the Sunnah deny and for which they provide no support: “these are rejected and may only be cited in order to condemn and refute them.”
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Reports that the Qur’an and the Sunnah neither confirm nor deny. These may be narrated for reflection, because the benefit of this category is “to expand something we possess only in summary form, or to name a person whom our law mentions anonymously—where specifying him brings us no real advantage. We mention such reports only as an adornment, not out of need or reliance upon them. Reliance and dependence rest upon the Book and the Sunnah of the Messenger of Allah—whatever has come down with sound or fair transmission, whereas what is weak is marked as such.”
We can only wish that Ibn Kathīr had adhered strictly to this method at the very beginning of his al-Bidāyah wa-l-Nihāyah, especially in the sections on the creation of the world and the stories of the prophets. Had he done so, he would have spared himself—and us—the abundance of flimsy Israelite lore that falls squarely into the second category, which ought to be rejected, denounced, and invalidated, and whose only reason for being recorded was the mere urge to collect and transmit.