---
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.