that the science of logic is of scant benefit, its harm is grave, and it is not one of the sciences of Islam (1). Concerning philosophy he says: “As for metaphysical philosophy, no one who hopes for success should busy himself with it, nor should anyone who shows promise place his confidence in its doctrines; this discipline is on one side, while what the messengers brought is on another. Yet the error of a person who, under the banner of ‘wisdom,’ is ignorant of what the messengers truly brought is worse than that of one who knows. I seek refuge with Allah—if those who stepped forward to refute the philosophers themselves became bewildered and fell into disarray, then what should we expect of those whom they were refuting? (2)”

This companionship—meaning his companionship with Ibn Taymiyya—prompted some people to seize upon it as a pretext for attacking his writings, believing them to be biased (3).

Those attacks sparked debate among the scholars of his own era and among later scholars as well (4), a matter we shall examine when we discuss his method in Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ (5).

Although many of the criticisms leveled against al-Dhahabi on doctrinal grounds were tinged with prejudice and fanaticism, we must nevertheless acknowledge that his overall intellectual formation was closely bound to hadith, to the hadith scholars, and to their outlook on the various sciences and their practitioners, as well as to their philosophical stance toward the rational disciplines. As we shall see, this had a clear impact on his historical method: he tied it firmly to the noble Prophetic hadith and its auxiliary sciences, so that biographical notices came to occupy a central place in his thought and became the foundation of many of his works.