was transcribed from the author’s own copy, penned in his hand during his lifetime in the years 739–743 AH, and it carries the most accurate and complete title; for that reason the book’s editors have adopted it.
Al-Dhahabī composed this work after completing his magnum opus, “History of Islam and the Deaths of the Famous and Noteworthy,” which he first finished in 714 AH and later revised, fair-copying part of it in 726 AH (1).
The author alludes to several of his other books and refers the reader to them within Siyar.
When his student al-Ṣalāḥ al-Ṣafadī listed some of al-Dhahabī’s biographical works devoted to individual figures—such as “Dusting Off the Quiver Concerning the Reports of Shuʿbah” and “Spend Your Day with the Reports of Ibn al-Mubārak,” among others—he remarked: “He has for each eminent person a self-contained monograph, like the Four Imams and those of comparable stature, yet he incorporated all of them into ‘History of the Nobles’” (2).
This statement makes it clear that he wrote Siyar after compiling all those numerous individual biographies. It is also noteworthy that the scribe of the earliest extant copy began copying it in 739 AH and reached the end of volume thirteen in early 743 AH. This means the author must have completed his book by 739 AH, if not earlier.
The distinguished scholar Dr. Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Munajjid asserted—without supporting evidence (3)—that the book was composed in 739 AH, basing his claim solely on the fact that the scribe Ibn Ṭūghān started copying his exemplar in that year.
We, however, believe that he began composing the work in 732 AH, or shortly before. Our evidence is al-Dhahabī’s own words in the biography of al-ʿAbbās, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ: “Sovereignty passed to the descendants of al-ʿAbbās and has endured with them, succeeded by thirty-nine caliphs down to our own time, a span of six hundred years, the first of whom was al-Saffāḥ. The caliph of our age is al-Mustakfī, whose name is proclaimed from the pulpits, while the power to invest and depose lies in the hands of…"