Eighth: His Passing

At last the journey of this eminent shaykh came to its close, and his fruitful life—filled with noble deeds and righteous words—drew to an end. In his final years he lost his sight, a disability that prevented him from completing his great work, “The Compendium of Musnads.” He disclosed this to one of his students, Ibn al-Jazarī, saying:

“I kept on writing it at night while the lamp flickered, until my eyesight departed along with it.”

Some place the onset of his blindness in the very last year of his life, that is, 774 AH.

Historians agree that he died in Damascus in Shaʿbān of 774 AH. Ibn Ḥajar fixed the date at the fifteenth of Shaʿbān, whereas Ibn Taghrī Birdī put it at Thursday, the twenty-sixth. The correct reading, however, is the sixteenth of Shaʿbān, as stated by his disciple al-Maqrīzī; the discrepancy arises only from differing determinations of the month’s beginning.

Damascus escorted its scholar and historian in an imposing funeral, and—according to his own will—he was laid to rest in the burial plot of Shaykh al-Islām Taqī al-Dīn Ibn Taymiyyah in the Ṣūfiyyah Cemetery outside Bāb al-Naṣr.

One of his pupils, Shaykh Muḥammad ibn Bahādur al-Zarkashī, lamented him in the lines cited earlier:

For your loss the seekers of knowledge grieved—
they came with tears that never run dry.
Were they to mix the water of their weeping with blood,
it would still be too little, O Ibn Kathīr, for one such as you.

May Allah shower the ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathīr with abundant mercy, grant him a dwelling in the gardens of bliss, and join us with him beneath the banner of the Master of Messengers, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd Allāh—peace and blessings be upon him.