tive in southern iraq. His father and uncle were
known as early collectors of Islamic oral tradi-
tion. As an adult, Ibn Ishaq lived both in Medina
and egypt, becoming famous for his mastery of
hadith and accounts of Muhammad’s battles and
raids (maghazi). He returned to Medina where
malik ibn anas (d. 795), the eponymous founder
of the maliki legal school, became his enemy,
possibly because of Ibn Ishaq’s Shii sympathies,
his use of hadith transmitted by Jewish converts,
or his questioning of Malik’s authority as a hadith
expert. Another respected scholar in Medina,
perhaps defending his wife’s reputation, accused
Ibn Ishaq of citing her falsely as one of his hadith
informants. In this stormy climate, he moved on
to baghdad, the new capital of the abbasid caliph-
ate, where he became a tutor to the son of the
caliph al-Mansur (r. 754–775).
While in baghdad, Ibn Ishaq wrote his famous
biography of mUhammad, known as Sirat rasul
Allah (The biography of God’s prophet), or simply
Al-Sira (The biography). It appears to have been
part of a larger project on the history of the world
that was intended for the edification of the caliph’s
son. The larger work, known as The Book of the
Beginning (Kitab al-Mubtada), included accounts
about the creation of the world and the lives of
the pre-Islamic prophets and culminated with the
biography of Muhammad. Ibn Ishaq may also have
wanted to add a history of the caliphate up to his
own time, but this part of the project was never
completed. The Sira emphasized the campaigns
Muhammad conducted against his opponents dur-
ing the Medina phase of his career (622–632),
but it also provided valuable information on
Muhammad’s ancestry, the history of mecca before
Islam, his life before the hiJ ra of 622, his encoun-
ters with pagan Arabs, Jews, and Christians, the
occasions when the qUran was revealed, and the
conversion stories of his early followers. The Sira
was later edited by Ibn Hisham (d. 833), who
removed material he believed to be objectionable
to the emerging Sunni consensus, but some of
the censored material can be gathered from later
sources. There was no other early source for the
life of Muhammad like Ibn Ishaq’s Sira, and all
other biographies of the Prophet have had to rely
on it, including biographies written by modern
scholars.
Ibn Ishaq attracted many students of early
Islamic biography and history during his years in
Baghdad. They transmitted his work to later gen-
erations after his death in 767.
See also arabic langUage and literatUre.Further reading: Muhammad ibn Ishaq, The Life of
Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul
Allah. Translated by Alfred Guillaume (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1955); Gordon Darnell Newby, The
Making of the Last Prophet: A Reconstruction of the Earli-
est Biography of Muhammad (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1989).Ibn Kathir, Imad al-Din Ismail ibn Umar
(1301–1373) leading Syrian historian, Quran
commentator, and scholar of hadith
Ibn Kathir was born in Busra, syria, and edu-
cated in the mamlUk madrasas of damascUs.
One of his most prominent teachers was taqi
al-din ahmad ibn taymiyya (d. 1328), the fore-
most Hanbali jurist of the Middle Ages, but he
considered himself a follower of the shaFii legal
school. Ibn Kathir became one of a circle of
leading Ulama who were consulted by Mamluk
rulers and held several minor appointments
at local mosqUes and madrasas. He is famous
among Muslims around the world today for his
tafsir (qUran commentary), which uses hadith
to illuminate meanings of the scripture. He
also authored a compendium of hadith, which
assembled the six major Sunni collections plus
additional hadith in one work. Among scholars
of medieval Islam, his book on Islamic history,
Al-Bidaya wa’l-Nihaya (The beginning and the
end) is held in high esteem. It is 14 volumes
long in its modern print edition and provides
a lengthy biography of mUhammad, a history ofIbn Kathir, Imad al-Din Ismail ibn Umar 333 J