Despite the vast historiographical composition authored by Ibn Aʿtham, surprisingly little is known of his person and biography. Later Muslim scholars were not entirely reluctant to consult his only surviving book, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the only aspect of Ibn Aʿtham's life that seemed interesting to them was locating him along the Shīʿī-Sunnī divide. What appears to be quite certain based on the little we know of his biography is that he was active, at least in certain periods of his life, in the northeastern peripheries of the Muslim world, that is, in Ḥarrān (today Harran, South Türkiye) and Jurjān (today, Gorgan, North Iran). His nisba al-Kūfī, relating to the city of al-Kūfa, where many Shīʿites lived, taken together with a few of his authorities mentioned in the work's first collective isnād, could also point towards his connection to al-Kūfa. After reviewing the available sources, including the data obtained from the Kitāb al-futūḥ's manuscripts and the scholarly publications of the past more than two centuries, I have arrived at the conclusion that his date of death can be placed, in all likelihood, between c. 925 and 945. On this basis, his floruit is to be dated between c. the 880s and the 930s, which also indicates the Kitāb al-futūḥ's time of composition. While a date in the first half of the 4th/10th century proposed for Ibn Aʿtham's time of death is not entirely new, unlike previous studies, I have established these dates on the basis of a detailed analysis of all pieces of information known to me, alongside the in-depth critical scrutiny of previous suggestions. It is also to be stressed that while scholarly inertia over the past two centuries might make it appealing to maintain the 314/926 date, first suggested by Christian Fraehn in 1834 and accepted in a large number of subsequent publications, it should now be definitely rejected because it has been proven to be unfounded.

Unlike the oeuvres of Ibn Aʿtham's famous predecessors and contemporaries, including al-Balādhurī, al-Yaʿqūbī, and al-Ṭabarī, his Kitāb al-futūḥ sparked no genuine interest in modern Arabic studies for an exceptionally long time. The Arabic historiographical tradition coincided with modern scholarly prejudices at this point. The small number of the Kitāb al-futūḥ's Arabic manuscripts and the fragmentary coverage of the surviving ones apparently reflect the former, while the lack of a modern printed edition until the late 1960s and early 1970s reflects the latter prejudice.