Ibn 'Asakir states in the introduction to his voluminous work titled "tarikh Madinat Dimashq" that he started working on it early in his life, but neglected it for a long time. Then, when Nur al-Din Mahmud ibn Zengi took over Damascus around the middle of the 12th century, the self-styled hero of the Jihad against the crusaders contacted the author upon hearing about the work and encouraged him to finish it. From that moment, it took Ibn 'Asakir ten years to bring the project to a successful end. Appropriately, he dedicated the work to Nur al-Din Mahmud. Ibn 'Asakir used in the writing of his work a large number of compilations that he had collected earlier in his life while studying in Baghdad and other eastern centers of Islamic learning. One particular work of which he acquired several copies is Ibn Sa'd's Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Kabir (and the shorter version titled Kitab al-Tabaqat al-Saghir). That book appeared in Syria a generation earlier when al-Khatib al-Baghdad resided there for a number of years. Ibn 'Asakir knew about Ibn Sa'd's work from his Damascene teachers and was keen to hear it from certified teachers in Baghdad. In my paper I argue that Ibn 'Asakir's work was the real big introduction of Ibn Sa'd's work to Syrian intellectuals. Moreover, I argue that Ibn 'Asakir heard this and other major works from a number of Baghdadi teachers who specialized in preserving what they saw as a Sunni tradition. These teachers are simply the students of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi and his "Sunni" circle, just like Ibn 'Asakir's teachers were in Damascus. Writing Tarikh Dimashq and before it transferring the Baghdadi Sunni tradition to Damascus was not a coincidence. It was part of a Syrian movement to strengthen the Sunni character of Syria, and Damascus in particular, in the face of two great challenges: the Christian Crusades and the Ismaili Fatimids of Egypt. It is the aim of this paper to prove that Ibn 'Asakir had this same intention, based on the long history of Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqat as representing the Ahl al-Hadith and then the Sunni perspectives of Islamic history. There is nothing coincidental about the meeting of Ibn 'Asakir and Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqat. In fact the latter served, or was made to serve, a similar purpose during the reign of the Shi'i Buyids in Baghdad during the late 10th and early 11th centuries.