“Liar and swindler (al-kadhdhāb, ad-dajjāl) … inventor of stories (wāḍi‘lqiṣaṣ)”, whose books, however, were read (or sold) in bookshops. This is how Shams ad-Dīn adh-Dhahabī (1274–1348), a Damascene historian, characterized Abū'l-Ḥasan al-Bakrī. He was not the only one to write about al-Bakrī in this manner. Other fourteenth-and fifteenth-century writers also evoked al-Bakrī's name in a clearly negative sense. lbn Kathīr (ca 1300–73), a Damascene also, mentioned Sīrat Dhī' l-himma wa'l-Baṭṭāl, Sīrat ‘Antar, al-Bakrī's biography of the Prophet (Sīrat al-Bakrī), and Sīrat ad-Danif, in one and the same stroke. He stressed that “the lies produced in al-Bakrī's sīra are an offence and a grave sin; their fabricator has fallen into the category of those warned by the Prophet: ‘He who reports lies about me deliberately shall be condemned to Hell.’” lbn Ḥajar al-‘Asqalānī (d. 1449), a leading Egyptian scholar, copied from adh-Dhahabī almost verbatim; to the works attributed to al-Bakrī he added what he considered al-Bakrī's most famous piece, the biography of the Prophet, already mentioned by lbn Kathlr. Al-‘Asqalānī also remarked that “there is not [by al-Bakrī] even one accurate description of a single one of Muhammad's expeditions (ma sāqa ghazwatan minhā ‘alā wajhihā); whatever al-Bakrī related was full of falsification, corruption, or additions”. Another Egyptian, al-Qalqashandī (1355–1418), chose al-Bakrī as an archetype of liars in his chapter on historically famous (or infamous) characters.