Sultan al-Malik al-Nāṣir—may God support them both. (1)

Given that the ʿAbbāsids first assumed the caliphate in 132 AH, the date to which he alludes must therefore be 732 AH. The al-Mustakfī bi-llāh mentioned here is Abū al-Rabīʿ Sulaymān ibn Aḥmad, born in 683 AH. After his father’s death, the Friday khuṭbah in Egypt was delivered in his name in 701 AH. Relations with Sultan al-Nāṣir soured toward the end of his tenure, and in 738 AH the sultan exiled him to Qūṣ in Upper Egypt, where he remained until his death in 740 AH. (2)

It is hardly plausible that the composition of the book should have occupied seven full years when most of its material was already at the author’s disposal, since he produced it only after completing his larger History of Islam.

Second — The scope of the work and the number of its volumes:

Al-Dhahabī arranged his Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ in fourteen volumes, aiming chiefly at uniformity in the number of folios; for the most part he observed no further organizing principle. Consequently, later copyists did not feel bound to adopt the author’s own division. (3)

He devoted the first and second volumes to the noble Prophetic biography and the lives of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. Yet he did not rewrite these sections; instead, he referred the reader to his monumental History of Islam, from which they were to be taken and incorporated into the Siyar. Thus, on the title flyleaf of the third volume of the first Aḥmad III manuscript there is a marginal note in al-Dhahabī’s own hand, written on the