Biographical Writing: Literary Genres

The most significant types of Arabic biographical writing that present themselves as complete summations of a life in one fashion or another are sīra, tarjama,barnāmaj, fahrasa, and manāqib. The sīra and tarjama were both geographically and historically quite widespread and are dealt with in detail below; the terms barnāmaj and fahrasa, however, have been limited to specific regions and periods. The term barnāmaj, in the sense of biography, was used almost exclusively in Islamic Spain (eighth–fifteenth centuries) and later, to a much lesser extent, in North Africa,^[7] while the use of fahrasa or fihrist to denote a biography or autobiography is restricted to North Africa and particularly to Sufi contexts.^[8] For brevity's sake, as the barnāmaj and fahrasa refer to texts that are structurally almost identical to the tarjama, they are addressed here as regional variants of that basic form.

As we shall see, the genres sīra and tarjama (in its several variant forms) eventually developed recognized subgenres in which the author recorded his own life rather than that of someone else. These constitute the two genres of early medieval Arabic literature that most closely resemble the western concept of autobiography. The last of the biographical forms mentioned above, however, the manāqib (lit. “virtues”), never seems to have been used for autobiographical purposes; the form was apparently too explicitly linked to praise and encomia to be adapted for use in autobiographical writings. Manāqib works were written about religious and political figures, groups of people, occasionally of cities, and even of the Islamic religion itself.^[9] The vast majority, especially in later centuries, were focused on religious figures, particularly Sufi mystics. Other terms associated with the biographies of religious figures are akhbār (accounts), akhlāq (morals), faḍā’il (superior qualities), khaṣā’iṣ (attributes), and ma’āthir wa-mafākhir (glorious deeds and gracious qualities). These forms, however, along with the manāqib, remained entirely biographical in nature and never seem to have developed parallel autobiographical traditions, as did the sīra and tarjama forms.