Therefore, Dr. Shākir Muṣṭafā says:
“In my view, history is an Arab-Islamic science—or it can certainly be regarded as such.” (1)
Earlier, al-Sakhāwī quoted Ibrāhīm ibn Abī al-Dam al-Ḥamawī as saying:
“The benefit of Islamic history—apart from its relative soundness—lies in its mention of the scholars of the Muḥammadan nation, their virtues, their knowledge, their admonitions, their wise sayings, and their biographies. From these, the practitioner can seek guidance in his affairs, reflect and ponder over them, and thus profit from their words and from the good that is reported about them, both in this world and the next.” (2)
Scholars devoted great attention to this discipline, transmitting reports orally until history began to be committed to writing halfway through the second century AH, as al-Dhahabī records. He states:
“In the year 143 AH, the scholars of Islam of that era began to put into writing ḥadīth, jurisprudence, and exegesis. Knowledge was increasingly recorded and classified, and books on Arabic, language, history, and the ‘days of men’ were compiled. Before this period the imams spoke from memory or transmitted knowledge from reliable but unarranged pages.” (3)
In this historical arena Ibn Kathīr was preceded by al-Ṭabarī, Ibn al-Jawzī, and Ibn al-Athīr, each of whom produced an Islamic chronicle that paired exegesis with history, or ḥadīth with history, or jurisprudence with history. What distinguishes Ibn Kathīr’s al-Bidāyah wa’l-Nihāyah is that it combines exegesis, ḥadīth, jurisprudence, and history all in one work.
Ibn Kathīr’s life in Damascus equipped him for writing history, and he was spurred to this monumental achievement by emulating his two teacher-historians, al-Dhahabī and al-Birzānī. Moreover, the age in which he lived—the Mamlūk era (4)—was characterized by a pronounced interest in historical writing. As Professor Maḥmūd Rizq Salīm notes:
“History stood at the forefront of the arts that enjoyed attention and patronage in this era; efforts converged, ambitions multiplied, and minds and hands competed to bring forth rich historical works.” (5)
There is no doubt that the Prophetic sīrah had a profound impact on the rise of Islamic historiography and on its development according to the method of the ḥadīth scholars in gathering reports and narratives (6). Nor is there any doubt that Ibn Kathīr wrote the sīrah first, which impelled him