he incorporated the bulk of that extensive material into the new book, a point his pupil Ṣalāḥ al-Ṣafadī noted when he said: “For every eminent figure he composed an independent work of its own … yet he inserted them all into Ta⁠ʾrīkh al-Nubalāʾ” (1). Nothing of comparable breadth or precision appears in his larger history, and the biographies found in Siyar bear this out—for instance those of Abū Ḥanīfah, Abū Yūsuf, Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan, ʿĀʾishah, Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyib, Ibn Ḥazm, and others.

3 – At the same time we observed that al-Dhahabī’s additions to the biographies of the “notables” in the middle and final sections of the book are fewer than what he recorded in Tārīkh al-Islām. Yet we also found supplements, emendations, corrections, critical remarks, and, beyond that, a complete recasting and selective refinement of many entries.

4 – We further discovered that al-Dhahabī introduced new elements into the biographies in Siyar that do not appear in Tārīkh al-Islām. Chief among them is his care to specify how many ḥadiths the major collections attribute to the person in question—such as the two Ṣaḥīḥs, the four Sunan, the Musnad of Baqī ibn Makhlad, and so forth. Thus he says in the biography of Abū ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarrāḥ: “Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim records one ḥadith for him, Jāmiʿ Abī ʿĪsā one, and the Musnad of Baqī fifteen.” Concerning Saʿd ibn Abī Waqqāṣ he writes: “The two Ṣaḥīḥs transmit fifteen ḥadiths for him; al-Bukhārī alone relates five, and Muslim eighteen … while the Musnad of Baqī ibn Makhlad contains two hundred and seventy.” And about ʿAbd Allāh ibn Masʿūd he states: “The two Ṣaḥīḥs agree on sixty-four ḥadiths for him, and al-Bukhārī alone brings out twenty-one—