No proper understanding of an historical work is possible without setting it against the original landscape of its time and place of production, and the Kitāb al-futūḥ is no exception to this general rule. However, while more fortunate Arabic authors attracted sufficient interest to result in the preservation of their memories in later biographical collections, Ibn Aʿtham was not included in these goldmines of information. Or to put it more precisely, the biographical entries devoted to him were not classified under his nasab, i.e., Ibn Aʿtham, but were arranged according to one of its lesser-known components, for which a chance discovery was needed to explore this information in the research on the Kitāb al-futūḥ. Until this late discovery, several experts tried to pinpoint Ibn Aʿtham's date of death and thereby a time of birth for his only extant writing.

The present chapter sets out to introduce the reader both to the available evidence about Ibn Aʿtham's biography and to review the earlier attempts to locate him in time and space. Although the latter might appear as a superfluous exercise in view of our current knowledge, it is still an essential task for two reasons. Firstly, because the tracking of this two-century-long process reveals much about the circumstances which contributed to the long persistence of the many misconceptions around the work and its author. Secondly, and more importantly, because the currently available single analysis of the entire work, written by Lawrence I. Conrad before the exploration of the key evidence, was based on a date that seems untenable in the light of what we know now. Yet, several insights and conclusions of that magisterial study merit detailed scrutiny and thus, neither those nor his entire argumentation can be simply disregarded merely because he assigned biographical dates much earlier than the actual life of Ibn Aʿtham. On the other hand, the early 3rd/9th-century date proposed by Conrad still exercised a considerable influence on his arguments, and thus it is important to understand how those results came into being and how the information on which they are based can be recontextualised.

Besides this, the present chapter also reviews the reception history of the Kitāb al-futūḥ both in mediaeval and early modern historiography and in the modern scholarly literature.