in Siyar the like of which is rarely to be found in other works of the same genre. This was a method al-Dhahabī pursued in many of his writings—above all in his monumental Taʾrīkh al-Islām—and it attests to the breadth of his vision, his extensive acquaintance with the literature of this discipline in every corner of the Muslim world, and the close ties he maintained with scholars of each region.

4 – Temporal balance: In this book al-Dhahabī endeavored to distribute the number of figures he recorded evenly over the long period it spans—seven full centuries—so that no age is favored over another. True, one notices some variation in the number of entries from one generation (ṭabaqa) to the next; yet, were we to arrange the work according to the subjects’ years of death and count how many are mentioned in each year, we would find a marked coherence in the yearly totals. Admittedly, a fair number of years deviate from this pattern, but that does not contradict the general tendency we have described; it merely reflects the fact that several notable individuals died in certain years owing to various causes, such as epidemics, wars, and the like.

5 – Length and brevity of the entries: Because of his wide reading and exceptional mastery of the science of narrators, al-Dhahabī had at his disposal an abundant store of material drawn from hundreds of biographical sources. This was facilitated by the broad temporal horizon of his book—from the dawn of Islamic history to the close of the seventh century—and its geographical horizon, which embraces the entire Muslim world. We have just noted how he succeeded in determining the caliber of his subjects by selecting only their foremost representatives; yet what seems even more important is that, for a scholar of such vast erudition, these luminaries are accompanied by a quantity of