| --- |
| license: cc-by-nc-sa-4.0 |
| pretty_name: "islamlab — Islamic Biographical Notices" |
| language: |
| - ar |
| task_categories: |
| - text-retrieval |
| - question-answering |
| - text-generation |
| size_categories: |
| - 100K<n<1M |
| tags: |
| - islam |
| - arabic |
| - biography |
| - prosopography |
| - hadith-sciences |
| - tabaqat |
| - classical-arabic |
| configs: |
| - config_name: default |
| data_files: |
| - split: train |
| path: train-*.parquet |
| --- |
| |
| # islamlab — Islamic Biographical Notices |
|
|
| **219,364 biographical notices** taken out of the ṭabaqāt, tarājim and |
| chronicle literature and given one row each: who the notice is about, which |
| work it stands in, and what that work says about him. |
|
|
| The Muslim scholarly tradition kept biographical records for a thousand years, |
| mostly so that a chain of transmission could be checked. Read at scale that |
| record is a prosopography — who taught whom, who lived where, who was trusted |
| and by whom. |
|
|
| | work | author | notices | |
| |---|---|---:| |
| | النكت الظراف على الأطراف | المزي | 15,540 | |
| | الضوء اللامع لأهل القرن التاسع | السخاوي | 9,872 | |
| | الثقات من من لم يقع في الكتب الستة | ابن قطلوبغا | 8,488 | |
| | تذهيب تهذيب الكمال في أسماء الرجال | الذهبي | 7,973 | |
| | شذرات الذهب في أخبار من ذهب | أبو الفلاح | 7,533 | |
| | مختصر تاريخ دمشق لابن عساكر | ابن منظور | 6,681 | |
| | مجمع الآداب في معجم الألقاب | ابن الفوطي | 5,493 | |
| | الإعلام بمن في تاريخ الهند من الأعلام المسمى ب (نزهة الخ | عبد الحي بن فخر الدين بن عبد ا | 4,529 | |
| | قلادة النحر في وفيات أعيان الدهر | الهجراني الحضرمي الشافعي | 4,390 | |
| | المنتظم في تاريخ الملوك والأمم | ابن الجوزي | 4,114 | |
| | إكمال الإكمال (تكملة لكتاب الإكمال لابن ماكولا) | ابن نقطة الحنبلي البغدادي | 3,824 | |
| | الدرر الكامنة في أعيان الماءة الثامنة | ابن حجر العسقلاني | 3,808 | |
| | المقفى الكبير | المقريزي | 3,709 | |
| | مرآة الزمان | سبط ابن الجوزي | 3,558 | |
|
|
| ## Columns |
|
|
| - `person` — the subject, taken from the entry heading with the entry number |
| split off into `entry_no` (113,099 rows have one). |
| - `sex` — `m` or `f` where the source marks the entry as a man's or a woman's |
| (3,602 rows); empty where it does not. |
| - `death_year_ah_mentioned` — a death year found in the opening of the notice |
| (3,046 rows). **Low on purpose rather than by accident:** classical |
| Arabic usually spells years out in words — *sanat iḥdā wa-sabʿīn* — and this |
| column only reports digits it actually saw. An empty cell means we did not |
| read one, never that the notice lacks a date. |
| - `source_title_ar`, `source_author_ar`, `work_id`, `page_start` — where the |
| notice stands, so it can be cited. |
| - `entry_id` — the same key as `unit_id` in the parent corpus. |
|
|
| The same person is written about in many works, and the notices are **not** |
| reconciled into one record per person: each row is one author's account. That |
| disagreement is the point. |
|
|
| ## Where this comes from |
|
|
| Derived from |
| [`islamlab/islamic-sciences`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/islamlab/islamic-sciences), |
| which is where the gate, the provenance and the credits live: scope is |
| **Ahl al-Sunnah wa'l-Jamāʿah**, and a work enters only if its author died by |
| 1350 AH, so every text is in the public domain. The machine-readable |
| transcriptions carry **CC BY-NC-SA 4.0**, and so does this. |
|
|
| Corrections and removal requests are welcome on the **Community** tab. |
|
|
