Oxford Dictionary of National Biography volumes

A biographical dictionary is a type of encyclopedic dictionary limited to

biographical A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or curric ...

information. Many attempt to cover the major personalities of a country (with limitations, such as living persons only, in ''

Who's Who A Who's Who (or Who Is Who) is a reference work consisting of biographical entries of notable people in a particular field. The oldest and best-known is the annual publication ''Who's Who (UK), Who's Who'', a reference work on contemporary promin ...

'', or deceased people only, in the ''

Dictionary of National Biography The ''Dictionary of National Biography'' (''DNB'') is a standard work of reference on notable figures from British history, published since 1885. The updated ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'' (''ODNB'') was published on 23 September ...

''). Others are specialized, in that they cover important names in a subject field, such as architecture or engineering.

History in the Islamic civilization

Tarif Khalidi stated that the genre of biographical dictionaries is a "unique product of Arab Muslim culture". The earliest extant example of the biographical dictionary dates from 9th-century

Iraq Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Saudi Arabia to Iraq–Saudi Arabia border, the south, Turkey to Iraq–Turkey border, the north, Iran to Iran–Iraq border, the east, the Persian Gulf and ...

, and by the 16th-century it was a firmly established and well-respected form of historical writing. They contain more social data for a large segment of the population than that found in any other pre-industrial society. The earliest biographical dictionaries initially focused on the lives of the

prophets of Islam Prophets in Islam () are individuals in Islam who are believed to spread God in Islam, God's message on Earth and serve as models of ideal human behaviour. Some prophets are categorized as messengers (; sing. , ), those who transmit Revelatio ...

and their companions, with one of the earliest examples being '' The Book of The Major Classes'' by Ibn Sa'd al-Baghdadi, and then began documenting the lives of many other historical figures (from rulers to scholars) who lived in the medieval Islamic world. The largest known biographical dictionary ever produced is called '' History of Damascus'' authored by a Muslim historian

Ibn Asakir Ibn Asakir (; 1105–c. 1176) was a Syrian Sunni Islamic scholar, who was one of the most prominent and renowned experts on Hadith and Islamic history in the medieval era. and a disciple of the Sufi mystic Abu al-Najib Suhrawardi. Ibn Asakir was ...

. When it comes to the numbers of individuals, American scholar of Islam

Richard Bulliet Richard W. Bulliet (born 1940) is a professor emeritus of Middle Eastern history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society and institutions, the history of technology, and the history of the role of animals in huma ...

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."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

References

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Sources

"Biographical dictionaries"
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"Biographical dictionaries"
Khabari Club Biography Topics. {{Authority control Encyclopedias Arabic literature

History in the Islamic civilization

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