—and his reputation among his fellow scholars, or the rank he commands among those of his own discipline, whether they share his creed or differ from it. On occasion he divests himself of the voluminous material he has gathered on certain celebrated figures by referring the reader to broader sources that treat them in greater detail.

Al-Dhahabī distinguished himself by a rare boldness that enabled him to criticize leading scholars and historians and to draw attention to the mistakes that had crept into what was transmitted from them. He did so in a balanced, scholarly manner that testifies to vast learning, noble intent, and an outstanding critical acumen. Numerous examples of this are scattered throughout the pages of this book.

Because Al-Dhahabī had, in his History of Islam, included two categories of biographees—the well-known and the truly eminent—he limited the present work to the lives of the distinguished luminaries. Nevertheless, at the end of some entries he briefly lists a number of the merely well-known, introducing them in summary form and recording their dates of death.

If one of those well-known individuals happens to share the same name as the eminent person whose biography he is writing, he is sometimes obliged to insert the former’s notice immediately afterwards to keep the two distinct.

He often gathers members of the same family who belong to roughly the same generation in a single place, even if they do not properly belong to that generation; thus he writes entries for the subject’s brothers, sons, and those allied to him.

Although Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ was extracted from the History of Islam, it was composed after it; Al-Dhahabī added to it a wealth of information that is absent from the History, subjected certain matters to critique and verification that he did not attempt there, and frequently cast the entries here in a form different from what he presented in the History of Islam.

This valuable work, endowed with features that are rarely found in any other of its kind,
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