Introduction

The historian and scholar of Prophetic Tradition (/faduh), whom we know by his family name, Ibn al-Athlr, lived in momentous times. His early manhood had seen the growth and the major successes of the Muslim moral, political and military response to the Crusades in Greater Syria and Mesopotamia (al-Jazira) and he lived into the first few decades of the thirteenth century A.D., long enough, for sure, to hear vivid evidence of and to fear, even if he did not experience directly, the dreadful destruction caused by the first Mongol incursion into the central lands of Islam.