has placed the verdict within its proper scale; yet I maintain that the critical verification of many texts—if not of them all—is a task of the utmost worth in every age.

Eighth: The importance of the work Siyar.
Siyar is not an abridgment of Tārīkh al-Islām. While speaking earlier about the method of Siyar we noted that al-Dhahabī chose to mention the eminent figures (al-aʿlām) and to omit the merely well-known; but this does not mean that he simply extracted all the biographies of those notables from Tārīkh al-Islām and copied them into the present book. Although almost every person treated in Siyar is likewise treated, in principle, in Tārīkh al-Islām, our comparative reading of the two works has uncovered a number of basic differences between them, in addition to those already mentioned. The most prominent are as follows:
1 – The author wrote the biographies of the earliest generation in Siyar in a manner completely different from what he penned in Tārīkh al-Islām. Most of these early entries are extensive, replete with material, and far superior in the richness of reports and the quality of organization to their counterparts in Tārīkh al-Islām. The examples are too numerous to list, and any researcher will sense them while studying the two books. One illustration will suffice: in Siyar al-Dhahabī devoted lengthy, detailed biographies—running to dozens of pages (1)—to the Prophet’s ﷺ wives and daughters, whereas in his History he mentioned them only in passing and with meager information.
2 – Al-Dhahabī composed a large number of individual monographs on prominent men in Islamic history, treating each as a separate work (2). When he later authored Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ