'Imad al-Din Isma'il Ibn 'Umar Ibn Kathir al-Basri, later al-Dimashqi, was born in roughly 700 AH in the region of Basra. After his father's death, when Ibn Kathir was about seven years old, he and his elder brother relocated to Damascus, where he received the bulk of his education. He studied under a number of the leading scholars of his time, including Ibn Ashginah and Ibn 'Asakir, and became a devoted student of Ibn Taymiyyah, whose views he came to hold and defend, particularly on questions of divorce law ? a position that brought him considerable hardship and, at times, active persecution.

Ibn Kathir rose to become one of the most respected scholars of his generation in the fields of Qur'anic exegesis, Hadith criticism, and history. His student Ibn Hijji, among others, attested to his exceptional command of authenticated Hadith and his skill in assessing the reliability of narrators and chains of transmission. His fatwas circulated widely and were sought after across the region, and he was recognized in his own lifetime as a leading authority in the fields to which he devoted his career.

His two most celebrated works are Tafsir al-Qur'an al-'Azim, his commentary on the Qur'an, which draws systematically on the Qur'an's own internal cross-references and on Hadith to explain the text, and Al-Bidayah wal-Nihayah, "The Beginning and the End," a universal history extending from the creation of the world through his own era. Stories of the Prophets, Qasas al-Anbiya', shares its method and much of its material with the early portion of that historical chronicle, and applies the same source-critical approach ? weighing narrations, tracing chains of transmission, and identifying material of doubtful origin ? to the accounts of the Prophets from Adam to the era immediately preceding Muhammad.

Ibn Kathir lost his eyesight shortly before his death in 774 AH. He was buried in the Sufi cemetery in Damascus beside his teacher and mentor, Ibn Taymiyyah. His scholarly legacy rests principally on his Tafsir and his historical chronicle, both of which continue to be read, cited, and republished across the Muslim world, and both of which inform the method visible throughout Stories of the Prophets.