islamlab/islamic-biographies

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, 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.