include the obscure and the unknown, according to the standards of the experts of every age rather than our own; for there is no doubt that thousands of the biographies he recorded are names many of today’s specialists have never even heard.
By contrast, in Siyar he confined himself to mentioning the al-aʿlām and left out those who were merely famous. Al-Dhahabī used the term al-aʿlām(1) to denote those who, in his own estimation, were exceptionally eminent, not simply well-known in someone else’s eyes. The very concept of an ʿalam varies from one author to another, depending on the breadth of his learning and his assessment of excellence in a science, an art, a craft, or any other field. Consequently, the vastness of al-Dhahabī’s scholarship, the breadth of his reading, and his long, seasoned experience in this discipline broadened the notion so much that we now encounter in Siyar biographies absent from other works on the famous, such as Ibn al-Jawzī’s al-Muntaẓam, Ibn al-Athīr’s al-Kāmil, Ibn Kathīr’s al-Bidāyah, Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī’s ʿIqd al-Jumān, and the like.
- Qualitative inclusiveness: In Siyar al-Dhahabī did not limit himself to any single category of al-aʿlām; rather, his biographies encompass many classes of people—caliphs, kings, princes and sultans, viziers, naqībs, judges, Qur’an reciters, hadith experts, jurists, men of letters, philologists, grammarians, poets, adherents of various religions and sects, scholastic theologians and philosophers, and a group of specialists in the pure sciences.
Although the author intended Siyar to be comprehensive of all categories of distinguished figures, we nevertheless find that he gave preference to the hadith scholars over others, so the overwhelming majority of