Conclusions

Summary

Ever since I developed a taste for literature and learning, I sought out the biographies of scholars and men of letters … like one enamored and impassioned, searching as a lover for his beloved.

Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī

With ardor I sought out the biographies and death-dates of worthy men of the past, reading of those whom each period had brought together; and the material I collected compelled me to seek more of it, and pursue the subject further.

Ibn Khallikān

This study began by suggesting that the notion of heirship proved formative of the Arabic biographical tradition. The genre originated among akhbārīs, not Ḥadīth-scholars. It appears to have grown out of the pre-Islamic practice of combining a genealogy with a narrative about the persons named. However, it assumed its characteristic form by adopting a particular kind of genealogy – the transmission of knowledge – as a model. Nearly any ṭaʾifa, that is, any group of persons engaged in the transmission of ʿilm, could attain sufficient dignity to merit the composition of a collective biography. Some early subjects of biography, such as singers and poets, had little or nothing to do with the religious sciences. Other groups, such as scholars of language, used biography to argue that they did have a role to play in matters of faith.