Ibn Kathir

Ismail ibn Umar ibn Kathir was born in Majdal near Busra in southern Syria and moved to Damascus in childhood, studying under prominent scholars including Ibn Taymiyyah and Al-Dhahabi. He became chief professor of hadith at the prestigious Ashrafiyya school and a leading Shafi'i legal authority in Mamluk Damascus.

Ibn Kathir's Tafsir al-Qur'an al-Azim is the most famous hadith-based commentary on the Quran in Sunni Islam. His monumental fourteen-volume universal chronicle, Al-Bidaya wa-al-Nihaya (The Beginning and the End), integrates cosmological origins, the history of biblical and Islamic prophets, and the detailed year-by-year history of the Islamic world up to his own day.