Biographical dictionary
A biographical dictionary is a type of encyclopedic dictionary limited to biographical information. Many attempt to cover the major personalities of a country (with limitations, such as living persons only, in Who's Who, or deceased people only, in the Dictionary of National Biography). Others are specialized, in that they cover important names in a subject field, such as architecture or engineering.
History
[edit] | The examples and perspectives in this section deal primarily with the Islamic world and do not represent a worldwide view of the subject. (August 2026) |
Islamic civilization
[edit]Although various form of biographical compendiums and collections have occupied a prominent place within many culture's histories,[a] biographical dictionaries have been particularly important within the Islamic literary tradition, with Tarif Khalidi going so far as to call the genre a "unique product of Arab Muslim culture".[1]
Early examples of Islamic biographical dictionaries back date back to 9th-century Iraq, and by the 16th-century the genre was a firmly established and well-respected form of historical writing.[2] Many of these Islamic biographical dictionaries are notable for containing more social data for a large segment of the population than other works of that period, making them useful for historical research. While the earliest biographical dictionaries focused on the lives of the prophets of Islam and their companions, with one of the earliest examples being The Book of The Major Classes by Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi, later dictionaries would begin to document the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world as well.[3] The largest known biographical dictionary ever produced within the medieval Islamic tradition is called History of Damascus authored by a Muslim historian Ibn Asakir.[4]
Regarding the scope of Islamic biographical dictionaries, American scholar of Islam Richard Bulliet argues that "a brief look at Brockelmann's Geschichte der Arabischen Litteratur is sufficient to convince anyone that the number of individual biographies extant must run into the hundreds of thousands and most likely into the millions."[5]
See also
[edit]Notes
[edit]- ↑ See further: Biography#Historical_biography
References
[edit]Citations
[edit]- ↑ Khalidi, Tarif (January 1973). "Islamic Biographical Dictionaries: A Preliminary Assessment". The Muslim World. 63 (1): 53–65. doi:10.1111/j.1478-1913.1973.tb03104.x.
- ↑ Scalenghe, Sara (2014). "Introduction". Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800. Loyola University Maryland. p. 16. ISBN 978-1107622791.
- ↑ Josef W. Meri (2005), Medieval Islamic civilization: an encyclopedia, vol. 2, Routledge, p. 110, ISBN 0-415-96690-6
- ↑ James Lindsay, Suleiman Mourad (2013). الاربعون حديثا في الحث على الجهادعن رسول الله، متصلة الاسناد. Brill. pp. 5–6. ISBN 9789004242791.
- ↑ Richard W. Bulliet, "A Quantitative Approach to Medieval Muslim Biographical Dictionaries" in Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Apr., 1970), p. 195
Sources
[edit]- "Biographical dictionaries" University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- "Biographical dictionaries" Khabari Club Biography Topics.
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