historical material so great that he had to cull from it only what suited his design for the entry, lest the book swell beyond the immense proportions he had already envisaged for it.

In line with what has just been said, al-Dhahabī strove to present a biography that was at once complete and concise; the abundance of information at his disposal was not allowed to pull him away from his overall method.

Al-Dhahabī was able to dispose of much of the copious data he had gathered on certain leading figures by referring the reader to broader sources that had treated that scholar in more detail than he himself deemed necessary for parts of the entry. Thus he says in the biography of ʿIkrima b. Abī Jahl, “Abū al-Qāsim Ibn ʿAsākir has exhaustively collected his reports”; in the biography of Yazīd b. Abī Sufyān, “He has a lengthy entry in the History of the ḥāfiẓ Abū al-Qāsim”; in the biography of Bilāl b. Rabāḥ, “His many merits have been fully recorded by the ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAsākir”; and in the biography of al-Kamāl Ibn al-Anbārī, after listing a number of his works, “Ibn al-Najjār has set out for him a long list of writings.” The examples are numerous.

Even so, the varying length of the entries in Siyar is obvious to anyone who consults the book: one biography may consist of only a few lines, while another can run to several pages.

His pupil Tāj al-Subkī (d. 771 AH) censured him for this practice of expanding some entries and abbreviating others in his historical works, regarding it as a form of sectarian bias and doctrinal inclination (1).

Yet our examination of the matter shows that al-Subkī overstated his criticism, prompted by his strong partisanship for the Ashʿarīs. It becomes clear that al-Dhahabī, in most cases, took into account the person’s stature and fame among the specialists in his field, or his standing among peers of the same discipline, whether the subject agreed with him in