Qāḍī Shuhbah, and that Ibn Ḥajjī continued the chronicle from 769 AH to 815 AH. Thereafter Ibn Qāḍī Shuhbah carried it forward to 840 AH in seven large volumes, which he later abridged to roughly half their size.
This is what has become evident to us, and Allah alone guides to what is correct. —End of quotation.
Muḥammad Rāghib al-Ṭabbākh
The Second View
This view holds that the present book—and what is claimed to be its supplement—are both the work of Ibn Kathīr. Its advocate is Ustadh Muḥammad Aḥmad Dahmān (may Allah have mercy on him), in an article he published in the Journal of the Arab Scientific Academy in Damascus, vol. 20, pp. 90–93, replying to the above-mentioned statement of Ustadh al-Ṭabbākh. I shall reproduce his article in full so that both opinions may be examined together.
After summarizing the points made in the first article, he says:
“Upon studying this matter I reached two conclusions:
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Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathīr ended his History with the events of 738 AH, and several manuscript copies conclude with that year.
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After arriving at that year the author later appended a supplement covering 739–774 AH, as found in the printed edition. This addition appears in some manuscripts but not in others, and it is, beyond any doubt whatsoever, by al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn Kathīr himself.
My proofs for the first point are:
First: the Aleppo manuscript copy discussed by Ustadh al-Ṭabbākh.
Second: the copy used by ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Naʿīmī (d. 927 AH) in his book Tanbīh al-Ṭālib wa Irshād al-Dāris, which deals with the schools of Damascus and their teachers. He extracted the passages of Ibn Kathīr’s History relevant to his subject and inserted them into that book, yet we find that he mentions nothing of the additions after 738 AH, nor any of the new schools or events that occurred after that date. Some of this information he quotes from sources other than Ibn Kathīr, and other material he omits outright because he had not seen it—even though the post-738 AH additions contain valuable material essential to his topic. This proves that the copy from which al-Naʿīmī was working lacked the additions found in the printed edition; it resembled the Aleppo copy preserved in the Aḥmadiyya School.
My proofs for the second point—that the addition is by Ibn Kathīr himself—are:
First: Some of the author’s pupils intervened in the text whenever the author referred to himself. When he names himself explicitly, the pupil adds honorific titles to the name. Thus the author writes ⦗321⦘ that in Shawwāl ʿImād al-Dīn Ibn Kathīr attended the tafsīr lesson; the pupil alters the phrase to read that in Shawwāl the eminent scholar, Shaykh ʿImād al-Dīn Ibn Kathīr, attended. When the author speaks in the first-person pronoun, the pupil adds his shaykh’s name and clarifies that it is he who is meant by the pronoun, as in ⦗216⦘ when the author is speaking about himself in the Jāmiʿ al-Marjānī