Isma'il ibn 'Umar ibn Kathir was born around 701 AH (1300 CE) near Busra in the Damascus countryside, and moved to the city as a young child following the death of his father, a preacher and jurist. He grew up under the guardianship of an elder brother and was educated in the traditional Damascene curriculum of Qur'an, hadith, and Shafi'i fiqh, studying under some of the leading scholars of his generation, including Jamal al-Din al-Mizzi, whose daughter he later married, and Taqi al-Din Ibn Taymiyyah, whose lectures he attended and whose positions he frequently, though not uncritically, defended in later controversies.

Ibn Kathir went on to teach hadith and jurisprudence at several of Damascus's leading institutions and served for a period as a khatib. His scholarly output was considerable and spans several disciplines. His Qur'anic commentary, Tafsir al-Qur'an al-'Azim, interprets scripture primarily through other Qur'anic verses and authenticated hadith rather than through the more speculative theological and philological approaches common among earlier exegetes, and it remains one of the most widely printed and consulted commentaries in the Muslim world today. His work in hadith criticism, including Jami' al-Masanid, reflects the same evaluative rigor.

His largest undertaking, Al-Bidayah wa'l-Nihayah ("The Beginning and the End"), is a universal history running from the creation of the world through the events of his own lifetime in fourteenth-century Damascus. Within it, the account of the Prophet Muhammad's military campaigns -- covering Badr, Uhud, Al-Ahzab, Khaibar, the Conquest of Makkah, and the later Madinan-period engagements through Tabuk -- forms a coherent, self-contained unit that draws together the earlier maghazi scholarship of Ibn Ishaq with material from the hadith collections of Al-Bukhari and Muslim, cross-referenced and evaluated according to the isnad-based methods that governed classical Islamic historical writing.

Ibn Kathir died in Damascus in 774 AH (1373 CE). This volume presents the maghazi portion of Al-Bidayah wa'l-Nihayah in an abridged English translation by Wa'il 'Abdul Mut'aal Shihab, first published by Dar Al-Manarah of El-Mansoura, Egypt, in 1420/2000. The translator's stated method, set out in his own note to the reader, was to condense rather than reproduce Ibn Kathir's text in full, to draw Qur'anic translations from Yusuf 'Ali's rendering, and to mark his own interpolations with bracketed notice so that Ibn Kathir's voice and the translator's remain distinguishable throughout.