Ibn Kathir's Qasas al-Anbiya' — Stories of the Prophets — has stood for over six centuries as one of the most complete Arabic accounts of the prophetic chain from Adam to Muhammad, peace be upon them all. This English edition renders that fourteenth-century Damascene scholar's narrative in full, following each Prophet's call, the response of his people, and the outcome that followed, drawn throughout from Qur'anic verse and the corpus of authenticated Hadith rather than from later legendary accretion.
Ibn Kathir, a student and steadfast defender of Ibn Taymiyyah, brought the same source-critical rigor to prophetic narrative that he applied to his celebrated historical chronicle Al-Bidayah wal-Nihayah and to his Qur'anic exegesis. Where popular retellings blur into folklore, Ibn Kathir consistently traces each account back to its origin, weighs competing narrations against one another, and pauses, repeatedly, to correct claims he judges to rest on Isra'iliyyat — reports absorbed from Jewish and Christian tradition without a sound chain of transmission.
The book moves chronologically through the full prophetic line: the creation of Adam and the fall; Noah's flood and the destroyed nations of Hud and Salih; Abraham's confrontation with idolatry and the founding of the Ka'bah; Joseph's trials in Egypt; Moses' long contest with Pharaoh and the years in the wilderness; David and Solomon's kingship; the birth, ministry, and ascension of Jesus; and, closing the volume, a full account of the life of Muhammad compiled by the translators from other early biographical sources, since Ibn Kathir's original did not treat it as a separate chapter.
Throughout, the translators — Sayed Gad, Tamir Abu As-Su'ud, and Muhammad A. M. Abu Sheisha — preserve Ibn Kathir's method of citation, retaining his attributions to al-Bukhari, Muslim, and the other major Hadith collections, alongside the Qur'anic text in Arabic with parallel English translation. A transliteration key, a biographical note on Ibn Kathir, and an editor's foreword by Noha Kamal Eddin Abu El-Yazid of Al-Azhar University's Faculty of Humanities accompany the text.
Suitable for close study and for family reading alike, this edition keeps the register of the original: a scholar's narration rather than a storyteller's embellishment, attentive throughout to what can be established from revelation and sound report, and careful to say so when it cannot.