Tarjama (Biographical Notice)
Most of the entries found in biographical compendiums belong to the genre tarjama, a term with Aramaic origins that can be referred to simply as a “biographical notice.”[16] In modern Arabic the term literally means a “translation” (cf. Aramaic targum) or an “interpretation,” a sense that was also present in medieval Arabic. But in medieval Arabic the verb tarjama also meant to give a work, or an individual section of a work, a title or heading, as seen in the introduction to a work by the famous Andalusian judge, al-Qāḍī ‘Iyāḍ: “I have given it the title [wa-tarjamtuhubi-] Madhāhib al-ḥukkām fi nawāzil al-aḥkām [The Methods of Judges in the Judgment of Cases].”[17] By extension, the term may have come to mean a work that was divided into sections with headings.
The term tarjama thus contains three central and interrelated ideas, that of explanation or interpretation, that of transformation into a different medium, and that of clarification by means of division into sections and labeling. The tarjama as biographical notice may be taken to be a representation of a person, to be distinguished from the physical being; it is an inexact, imperfect copy of a life, just as a commentary cannot represent the original text, or a translation represent the Qur’ān.[18] But it is a key to the person, a clarification, an attempt to label and explain his or her actions and accomplishments and make them comprehensible to posterity and accessible to the student. To reach the original person in a more direct fashion can only be accomplished by reading the original text, that is, his or her works, or by receiving his or her teachings through oral transmission, passed down through generations of teachers. The biography may therefore be seen as a commentary on an original, a key to a great thinker, past or present.
The basic constituent parts of a tarjama usually consisted of an account of the subject's name and ancestry, date of birth (and death, if applicable), a catalog of teachers (mashyakha, mu‘jam, or thabat),[19] a bibliography of works written by the subject (fihrist or fahrasa),[20] travel and pilgrimage accounts (riḥla),[21] and collections of entertaining or illuminating anecdotes (nawādir and akhbār).[22] In addition, depending on the subject's professional affliation, a tarjama might include collections of personal letters and formal epistles (rasā’il and ikhwāniyyāt),[23] selections of poetry (shi‘r),[24] accounts of visions and dreams (manāmāt or manāẓir),[25] and accounts of minor miracles (karāmāt) and virtues (manāqib).[26]
These sections of the tarjama were also composed and published in certain contexts as independent works completely separate from any entry in a biographical compendium. These forms (both as traditional sections of a tarjama and as independent works) merit careful study both for the information they contain about Islamic society in different time periods and as the means for representing dimensions of an individual's life. Unfortunately, however, most of them have attracted little scholarly attention because they fall outside the primary lines of modern historical and religious research. It is astonishing how little information is available about the historical development of these forms despite their status as the primary vehicles through which an enormous amount of knowledge about premodern Arabo-Islamic society has come down to us. Literary scholars have rejected them as more properly the realm of historians, and historians have, on the whole, treated them as transparent and unproblematic, deeming the literary conventions either obvious or uninteresting.[27]
The Arabic tarjama represents a carefully categorized frame for depicting the most crucial information about a person in an intellectual context that focused on a person's value as a transmitter and contributor to knowledge and to a shared academic and spiritual heritage. The categories in which this information was presented existed both as constituent parts of the tarjama itself and, when expanded, as independent literary genres that could circulate on their own.
Curiously, the portion of the tarjama for which the least articulated terminology developed was the opening narrative segment, which provided the historical “life story” of the subject, although some sources do refer to this section of a tarjama as the sīra. Here a sharp contrast with the western tradition becomes quite clear, for it is only the “life story” that is generically labeled and developed in the western tradition as auto/biography. In the West, it is relatively rare for this narrative to be coupled directly with a person's literary, artistic, or intellectual output; even personal letters are often edited and published separately. In a lengthy medieval Arabic tarjama, however, the basic historical information was often combined directly with the biographer's (or autobiographer's) selection of the subject's best poetry, letters, and bons mots; the subject's life story and literary production were thus often represented side by side and traveled through time together as the tarjama was quoted, expanded, or summarized by later biographers and compilers.