Al-Dhahabī and His Book Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ

All praise belongs to Allah, Lord of the worlds. May blessings and peace be upon our master Muḥammad, the unlettered Arab Prophet, and upon his pure family and righteous companions, the guiding stars at every moment. To proceed:

This is, God willing, a concise and useful study of the life of the historian of Islam, the trustworthy, precise, and gifted critic Imām Shams al-Dīn al-Dhahabī, along with an appraisal of his precious book Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ (The Lives of Eminent Figures) and its rank among works of the same genre. I have arranged it in two chapters: the first on al-Dhahabī’s biography, and the second on his book Siyar.

The first chapter examines the Damascene environment in which al-Dhahabī was raised, with its wide-ranging intellectual revival, its doctrinal disputes, the spread of ignorance, and the common people’s fascination with the unseen.

I have endeavored to portray his devout, scholarly family setting, which reared him from early childhood on a love of knowledge and its bearers, thereby preparing him for a clearly defined scholarly future. When his character matured, we find him devoted to the pursuit of learning—both reading and hadith. I then traced his journeys in search of knowledge and was able to limit them to Syria, Egypt, and the Ḥijāz, demonstrating that his trip to Egypt occurred between the months of Rajab and Dhu al-Qaʿdah in the year 695 AH, thereby correcting the opinions of some historians on this point.

I also clarified the nature of his studies, noting that they were diverse and by no means confined to a single field, yet they never departed from the circle of the religious sciences and their auxiliary disciplines—history, grammar, language, and literature.