Ṭabaqāt (Biographical Dictionaries)

Most Arabic biographies are found in special collections, referred to in English as “biographical dictionaries” or “biographical compendiums.” The earliest of these were devoted to the generations (Ar. sing. ṭabaqa) in a category or class of people, hence the Arabic name for the genre, ṭabaqāt (lit. “generations”). A great number of different “classes” (sing. ṣinf or ṭā’ifa) provided the framework for such compendiums in the Islamic Middle Ages: Qur’ān reciters, physicians, caliphs, scholars of ḥadīth, jurists of the Shāfi‘ī legal tradition, theologians of the Mu‘tazilī school, Shi‘ite scholars from Bahrain , grammarians from Yemen, famous women scholars of Egypt, poets of the sixteenth century, poets the author met personally, teachers of the author, and so on. Occupations, geographic origins, sectarian and dogmatic affiliations, historical periods (particularly centennial compilations), tribal and family groupings, and even first names and nicknames were all used as parameters for defining a particular group to be covered in a given biographical dictionary. Women scholars were commonly included in medieval biographical compendiums, and some collections devoted special sections to various classes of women including poets, religious scholars, and mystics.^[14] The variety as well as the number of ṭabaqāt works is at times overwhelming. Medieval Islamic society preserved massive amounts of biographical data, and these data were accessed, referenced, and cross-referenced in a multitude of ways.

The organization of these biographical works and other reference works from the same period reflects an intellectual milieu in which classification and categorization, often involving the marshaling of astonishing amounts of specific detail such as dates, names, book titles, and lists of teachers represented the predominant methodology for the acquisition, organization, authentication, and transmission of knowledge. The ubiquity of this intellectual methodology has led some modern scholars to decry the entire Arabic autobiographical and biographical tradition as one concerned only with human beings as representatives of classes or (stereo)types and not with individuals and individual characteristics.

This judgment misses the point of classical Arabic biographical writing as its practitioners understood it. Beginning in the ninth century and possibly earlier, Muslim scholars elaborated competing visions of (religious) authority according to which various groups of qualified practitioners (e.g., ḥadīth scholars, jurists, Sufis) claimed responsibility for the maintenance of aspects of the Prophetic legacy. Given this framework, the biographer's primary task consisted of establishing the specific group's claim to the Prophetic legacy and then documenting the transmission of that legacy from one generation of practitioners to another. This paradigm carried over even to groups whose relation to the Prophet and the Revelation were tenuous or nonexistent (physicians, singers, poets, etc.), all of whose biographers wrote of them as members of professional collectivities. Especially in the more obviously religious contexts, the biographer had little incentive to document his subjects' idiosyncrasies. Thus ṭabaqāt do not fail to take account of individuality; rather, they succeed in excluding it.^[15]

This does not mean that ṭabaqāt entries entirely lack individuation; indeed, many of them contain vivid incident and evocative detail. The amount of individuation and detail varies according to both the “class” of the person represented and his or her social and historical prominence: famous figures almost invariably receive more detailed treatment; biographical notices of poets generally feature more clearly delineated personalities than those of ḥadīth scholars. Yet even these elaborations must be understood in the context of collective and contrastive self-definition through biography. A figure who attained exemplary status in his professional collectivity, or who became a subject of dispute in the controversies that erupted between scholarly and professional groups, attracted to himself or herself evidentiary narratives pro and con, all of which found their way into his or her biographical entry. Disputation, competition, and contention prompted a similar expansion of autobiographical narrative, as the works of Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq, Ibn Buluggīn, and al-Suyūṭī—among others—show.

Seen in this light, the relationship of autobiography to biography appears to be rather ambiguous. On the one hand, biography provided a literary framework for the emergence of autobiographical literary forms. On the other hand, if the overall project of biography tended to downplay and even exclude “individuality,” it is difficult to see how the emergence of autobiography as a literary act can be traced directly to the biographical endeavors that preceded it. Even so, the raw material and research methodologies used by compilers of these biographical dictionaries eventually gave rise to autobiographical writings in the form of the tarjama, an individual (biographical or autobiographical) entry in a larger compilation.