I closed the chapter with a concise inventory of his writings, abridgements, and hadith extractions, arranged by subject. I indicated which of them have been printed and which remain in manuscript form, together with a brief note on the location of each manuscript copy. In all, I was able to list two hundred and fifteen compositions, abridgements, and extractions attributed to him.

The second chapter, which I devoted to the method and importance of the Siyar, opens with a discussion of the book’s title and its composition, and there I succeeded in fixing the date of authorship at 732 AH—contrary to what is commonly held. I then turned to the scope of the work and the number of its volumes, and concluded that al-Dhahabī did not actually compose the first and second volumes; instead, he instructed the copyists to extract them from his larger History of Islam. Nor were these two volumes lost, as the waqf deed for the book in the Maḥmūdiyya Madrasa makes clear. I further demonstrated, beyond any doubt, that the thirteenth volume now in our possession is not the final one, as the distinguished Dr. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid maintained and others followed him in asserting; rather, there is another volume—the fourteenth—that completes the work. On that basis, I leaned toward the view that al-Dhahabī arranged his book into approximately forty generations, not thirty-five as is widely assumed.

In this same chapter I also examined the book’s organization by ṭabaqāt (generations). I deemed it necessary to survey the emergence of this stratified arrangement in the history of Muslim writing and to define how al-Dhahabī himself understood the concept by studying his biographical works that are ordered by generations, among them the Siyar. I believe I have been able to explain the apparent contradiction arising from the differing number of generations in his writings—although they span the same period—by showing that the categories of individuals profiled vary from one work to another. And I then showed that the benefit