CHAPTER TWO
The Origins of Arabic Autobiography

Biographical Traditions: Early Prototypes

The Arabs of pre-Islamic times practiced a type of oral biography in the form of short narratives called akhbār (sing. khabar). When reciting his genealogy, a tribesman would add identifying remarks and accounts of memorable incidents associated with certain figures in the lineage.^[1] Similarly, a poem would be transmitted along with reports about the poet and the occasion for the composition of the verses. These paired elements, the informational khabar and the transmitted text (whether a list of names or a poem), affirmed each other's authority and authenticity, and the joined elements of anecdote and poem, or anecdote and genealogy, commonly remained together in oral tradition as a single discursive unit. For this reason, perhaps, the khabar remained unitary and limited in focus and never expanded to the point of becoming the summation of a life.^[2] With the advent of Arabic writing and the proliferation of literacy, it was primarily by the accumulation and combination of akhbār that biographies (along with various sorts of extended history accounts) were first constructed. The pattern of linking poetry and prose into a single discourse imprinted itself very strongly on early Arabic written literature and greatly influenced the formation of written historical and literary genres during the early Islamic period (seventh–ninth centuries).^[3]

From the rich but fragmentary materials of oral tradition, a written scholarly tradition of compilation and anthologization emerged. Under the early caliphs of the Umayyad dynasty (661–750), the historical lore of the pre-Islamic Arabs, along with reports of events in early Islamic history, was committed to writing. Massive collections of poems, place-names, genealogies, rare and obscure vocabulary, and many other types of knowledge were compiled directly from oral sources. The tenth-century bibliographer Ibn al-Nadīm has left a catalog of these early works, which also included lists of caliphs, compilations of anecdotes about poets, and incidents from the lives of early political figures. From such early collections of akhbār, later historians compiled the first dynastic and annalistic histories, sometimes juxtaposing conflicting accounts in a single work and leaving the reader to choose among them. Finally, reports of the words and actions of the Prophet Muhammad were collected in authoritative compendiums that listed the transmitters of each report by name. Eventually, the written tradition began to generate its own distinctive genres, less dependent on the form of the raw data being collected, among which were a number of genres that can be more properly termed biographical in varying degrees.

Influenced perhaps by the genealogical model, the earliest independent biographical listings take as their subject groups of specialized professionals such as ḥadīth transmitters, poets, singers, and so forth, rather than single individuals.^[4] The treatment of subjects as members of a group, however defined, remained the most common technique of Arabic biographical writing. The major exception was the life of the Prophet Muhammad, recensions of which date back to the eighth century. Early versions of his life story, called maghāzī (military expeditions), deal primarily with his campaigns, while later compilations, called siyar (see below), offer accounts of his career from birth to death.^[5] Although biographies of later figures were never as detailed as those of the Prophet, the siyar provided a model of life narration whose influence is evident in the biographical as well as the autobiographical writings of later centuries.

By the seventh century, the reports of the Prophet's career had been collected and arranged into a sequential narrative. But many scholars were interested in such reports only to the extent that they could support, or produce, a particular interpretation of the law. Reports of legal, ritual, and theological importance were thus separated out and given the name ḥadīth, “reports of the Prophet's exemplary words and deeds.” To confirm the reliability of ḥadīth reports, it was necessary to examine the men and women who had transmitted them. Did the scholar cited as the transmitter of a particular report have a reputation for veracity and good character? Could he have met the teacher from whom he claimed to have heard the ḥadīth? Were the two men actually in Mecca (or Medina, or Kufa) at the same time? Did he receive authorization (ijāza) to transmit this particular report? And so forth. To keep track of such information, ḥadīth scholars compiled lists of the Prophet's companions and of those Muslims of subsequent generations who transmitted on their authority. Many such lists contain little more than names, in chronological or alphabetical order; others, however, notably the compilation of Ibn Sa‘d (d. 845), contain extensive akhbār about many of their subjects. As crucial elements in the authentication of transmitted knowledge, biographical data were rapidly assimilated to, and developed within, the domain of historical writing.^[6]

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.

Sīra (Exemplary Life Story)

The sīra is the earliest of the full biographical forms, dating at least to the second Islamic century (eighth century) with the works of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767) and Ibn Hishām (d. 828 or 833) on the Prophet Muhammad. Derived from the verb sāra, meaning “to go” or “to travel,” the noun sīra denoted a path or journey, one's manner of proceeding, and by extension, the behavior or conduct of an individual.^[10] It eventually came to mean a biography, in particular that of the Prophet Muhammad. The form soon came to serve as a vehicle for the retelling of other famous lives, such as Ibn Shaddād's sīra of Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī), Badr al-Dīn al-‘Aynī's biography of the Mamluk sultan al-Mu’ayyad, al-Sayf al-muhannad fīsīrat al-malik al-Mu’ayyad (The Fine Indian Blade on the Life of King al-Mu’ayyad), and many others.

The sīra thus became an independent work devoted to the biography of an individual; although there are far fewer of these texts than the hundreds of thousands of shorter biographical notices that have come down to us, they still constitute a sizable body of literature. In addition, the term sīra appears to have carried the connotation of an exemplary life, such as that of the Prophet Muhammad or his son-in-law, ‘Alī, and in certain later periods is found predominantly among Shi‘ite writers. In the late medieval and premodern periods, the title manāqib (virtues) became the most common term for single-subject biographies of religious exemplars. Despite the change in nomenclature, manāqib works often proceeded in the manner of a sīra, documenting the subject's career from birth to death using eyewitness testimony and lists of teachers, students, family members, and works composed.

The term sīra grew to encompass autobiographies as well, as seen in the case of the work of another al-Mu’ayyad, al-Mu’ayyad al-Shīrāzī (d. 1077), who recounts the events of his own life, although it is difficult to determine whether the title Sīrat al-Mu’ayyad was originally used by the author or applied to the text by later copyists. In any case, the two types of sīra, biographical and autobiographical, were not initially distinguished from one another. The genre, as such, consisted of the literary representation of a life as a subgenre of history and did not differentiate between first-person and third-person texts; and as some autobiographical texts were also written in the third person, the texts themselves were at times not formally different. Although a sīra might be given a formal, often flowery, title when composed, it later often came to be known simply as “The Sīra of so-and-so” in medieval bibliographies, indexes, and cross-references in other works.^[11]

The term sīra in reference to an independent auto/biographical text became less and less common over the centuries (with the exception of its continual use in reference to the biography of the Prophet), and fifteenth-and sixteenth-century writers such as al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Ṭūlūn, and al-Sha‘rānī do not even mention it in their discussions of autobiography. One reason for this disappearance may be that by this later period the term sīra had also come to designate a genre of folk epic, such as the epics of the poet-warrior ‘Antar ibn Shaddād, the heroine Dhāt al-Himma, and the Bedouin tribe of the Banī Hilāl.^[12] This extension of the term may well have grown out of the idea of the exemplary life, for the genre consists primarily of highly romanticized accounts of larger-than-life heroes and their adventures. The term was revived in the twentieth century, however, in modern Arabic both as a term for biography and as part of a compound neologism, al-sīra al-dhātiyya (self-sīra), now the most common term for autobiography.

Most Arabic biographical writings from the early medieval to the modern period, however, do not take the form of independent works, that is, as individual sīras (Ar. pl. siyar), but rather in various forms of biographical collections and anthologies. The production of biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt ), annalistic histories (tawārīkh), which included biographical notices, and biographical materials preserved in anecdotal form (akhbār) reached stupendous proportions during the Islamic Middle Ages. Some of the larger biographical compendiums contain well over ten thousand biographical notices, and the number of compendiums themselves is in the thousands. Biographical writing was for centuries one of the most widespread genres of Arabic literature.^[13]

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.

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.

Autobiographical Subgenres

When the author of a biographical compendium came to a point where it was logical or desirable to write his own entry, he did so in either the first- or third-person voice, and the result was termed a tarjamat al-nafs, “self-tarjama,” or the author was said to have written a tarjama of himself (tarjama nafsah or tarjama li-nafsih). Even more widespread as a practice was the writing of a self-tarjama so that it could be included in a biographical compendium edited by someone else. At times these autobiographies were produced at the direct request of the compiler of the biographical dictionary. Many such texts are included in collections that consist primarily of biographies and are sometimes only identified as autobiographies by a single line or phrase such as “the following text that he wrote about himself.” The autobiographical text mught appear in its complete form, or the compiler might present only selections from the autobiography, which are then interspersed with material from other sources confirming, contradicting, or supplementing the autobiographical passages. At times the result is a seamless account in which it is quite difficult to distinguish between the hand of the biographer and the hand of the autobiographer; at other times the final product may clearly reproduce the voice of the autobiographer separate from that of the biographer and those of additional sources.

One rich example of this process is the “autobiography” of Ibn al-‘Adīm (d. 1262) as told to Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī (d. 1229), which includes passages, carefully distinguished as such, from Ibn al-‘Adīm's written autobiography (produced at the request of Yāqūt), oral material collected from Ibn al-‘Adīm in an interview with Yāqūt about the written autobiography, as well as a variety of other sources, both written and oral.^[28] Yāqūt (one of the major biographical compilers of his day and himself the author of an autobiography) meticulously reproduces all of these separate voices in this text and in a number of similar examples. The resulting texts reveal a great deal about Yāqūt's methodology in conducting interviews, gathering information, and assembling texts from oral and written primary sources. Through these texts we can catch glimpses of the autobiographical substrata of the mass of biographical writings that have come down to us in anthologized form. A thorough examination of the biographical compendiums should provide more concrete indications as to the nature and extent of such autobiographical practices, even though many of the autobiographical texts referred to are no doubt lost.

Thus the biographical tarjama, like the sīra, developed an autobiographical subgenre. At first, these self-composed autobiographical notices were scarcely distinguishable from their biographical siblings; this subgenre continued to exist for centuries. Eventually, however, the self-tarjamas provided a major impetus for the development of independent autobiographies and began to take on distinguishing characteristics of their own.

Other Influences

Discussions of the contribution of ancient Greek and Persian literatures to the development of Arabic autobiography focus primarily on the impact of works by the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon (d. ca. 200) and the Persian physician Burzōē (sixth century).^[29] Arabic translations of these texts circulated widely in the Middle Ages, and references to them appear in several Arabic autobiographies written between the tenth and twelth centuries. The philosophers al-Rāzī (Latin Rhazes) and Ibn Sīnā (Latin Avicenna), the physicians Ibn Riḍwān and Ibn al-Haytham, and Samaw’al al-Maghribī, a Jewish convert to Islam, all note their familiarity with one or another of these texts in their own autobiographical writings.^[30]

Burzōē is best known as the translator of the famous collection of animal fables, the Panchatantra, from Sanskrit into Middle Persian. His Persian text was then translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 755 or 756) in the early eighth century and retitled Kalīla wa-Dimna. All that is known about Burzōē's life comes from the short texts prefaced to various redactions and translations of Kalīla wa-Dimna, which include at least five different versions of his travels to India and two versions of his autobiography. One of the most common of the accounts of his journey to India relates that the Persian king Khusraw Anūshirawān (r. 531–79) had heard of a fabulous collection of tales in India and charged Burzōē with the task of obtaining it. Once in India, Burzōē resides in the court of the Indian king for a time before daring to attempt to see this marvelous book. He befriends an Indian by the name of Azawayh and discourses lengthily with him on the nature of true friendship. Finally, he makes his request, and Azawayh brings him the book from the king's chambers. Burzōē copies it, translates it, and then returns to Persia. King Khusraw is so pleased that he offers Burzōē whatever reward he should desire, but Burzōē accepts only a cloak as recompense and requests that his own life story be appended to the work. The king orders this done.

Another version has Burzōē traveling to India in search of powerful herbs that grow in the mountains there, which, when properly prepared, are capable of reviving the dead. Despite many attempts, Burzōē fails in this task. He then meets a group of Indian sages, however, who explain that this legend is but an allegory: the mountains are wise men, the herbs their books, and the dead the ignorant of the earth. Satisfied with this explanation, Burzōē returns to Persia and presents a large number of books he has translated to King Khusraw.^[31]

Burzōē's autobiography offers yet another version of the events narrated in the account of his journey to India. An accomplished physician, Burzōē despairs of his craft because, in the end, he can only cure disease temporarily and all of his wards eventually succumb to death. He seeks spiritual solace, but none of the religions he turns to offers an answer to his malaise. In the text he twice mentions that he traveled to India, presumably as part of his spiritual quest, and once notes that he translated books there. Eventually, however, he renounces the world and becomes an ascetic.

Burzōē's life story is recounted in an ahistorical mode devoid of such details as names, dates, or places and is structured in a manner that evinces little sense of chronology. It can scarcely be said to have influenced the vast majority of Arabic autobiographies, which are specifically devoted to documenting the historical details of their authors' lives. Yet one text in particular, by al-Ghazālī (d. 1111), does bear some resemblance to Burzōē's text. Al-Ghazālī was a religious scholar and professor at the pinnacle of his highly successful career when he suffered a crisis that literally left him unable to speak. According to his autobiography, al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl (The Deliverer from Error), as a result of this episode he retired from public life in pursuit of Truth.^[32] None of the known schools of religious thought satisfied him, however, until he encountered Sufi mysticism, which provided the spiritual peace he craved. He withdrew from the world to live the life of an ascetic but eventually, years later, returned to his post and wrote his autobiography as a guide to other seekers. Thus, unlike Burzōē's nihilistic despair, al-Ghazālī's text draws on Islamic traditions of didacticism and emulation and offers itself as a guide to the true path.

Galen of Pergamon included personal references and autobiographical details in a number of his writings, but two works in particular are thought to have had some influence on the early Arabic tradition: On My Books and On the Ordering of My Books. In the former, Galen sought to provide a definitive list of his own works after having noted in the book markets of Rome that some of his works were circulating under the names of other authors and still other works were being falsely attributed to him. In the latter, however, Galen did more than simply list his works. In the opening section he attempted to order them as they should be read by students, from the most basic texts to the most difficult and complex, while in a subsequent section he provides brief accounts of his reasons for writing certain works and the time and place in which he did so. In this rough chronology Galen includes brief references to his travels and education and his lengthy conflicts with rivals jealous of his success.^[33]

Autobibliographies similar to Galen's On My Books did indeed become one of the common features of Arabic autobiography. At times these book lists circulated independently, but more often, unlike Galen's work, they were included in a larger autobiographical work that also documented other aspects of the author's life such as his birthdate, genealogy, teachers, and travels. Although On the Ordering of My Books includes more in the way of personal detail, no Arabic autobiography is structured in a manner similar to Galen's text. The one element for which there are numerous parallels, however, is Galen's account of his jealous rivals. Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq's autobiography (translated in this volume) is very similar in tone to passages in Galen, and Ḥunayn, the preeminent translator of Galen of his day, was certainly familiar with this text; however, Ḥunayn's account is more closely patterned on the biblical/Qur’ānic account of Joseph, which he, as a Christian, would have known equally well (see the introduction to the translation). Another account of intellectual rivalry is found centuries later in the autobiography of al-Suyūṭī, also translated in this volume.

It is clear that the autobiographical writings of both Burzōē and Galen circulated widely and may thus have helped to set the stage for the emergence of the Arabic autobiographical tradition; however, other than the autobibliography subgenre noted above, neither text seems to have influenced in any direct manner the form, structure, style, or content of Arabic biographical or autobiographical writing.

A final thread that played a critical role in the rise of Arabic autobiography was that of spiritual, particularly Sufi, autobiographical writings the origins of which are traced by Rosenthal as far back as al-Muḥāsibī (d. 857) and al-Tirmidhī (d. 898), and continue through al-Ghazālī's al-Munqidh min al-ḍalāl and the works of many later Sufi autobiographers such as al-Simnānī, Zarrūq, al-Sha‘rānī, al-Yūsī, and Ibn ‘Ajība.^[34] In these works the author's path of spiritual development constitutes the central focus of the text. They are thus by definition texts that portray primarily an “inner self” and are constructed on a model of transformation and development. They are also, even more clearly than their scholarly counterparts, constructed as models for emulation in the sense that embedded in the text is a call or an invitation to the reader to travel the same spiritual path. Several of these texts culminate with the author's “conversion” to the spiritual or mystical life and may thus also be linked to conversion autobiographies such as those by Samaw’al al-Maghribī, who converted to Islam in the twelfth century, and the Christian writer Fray Anselmo Turmeda, who converted to Islam in the fourteenth century.

Autobiography as a specific type of Arabic literature thus evolved mainly in the context of the Arabic biographical tradition, which in turn had emerged primarily as a branch of historical writing. Autobiographical writing developed first within two primary forms: sīra and tarjama. Limited exposure to pre-Islamic Greek and Persian models in Arabic translation exerted some influence on physicians and philosophers of the tenth to twelfth centuries—the two classes of scholars most directly involved with ancient Greek and Persian thought. The Sufi spiritual autobiography also emerged as a recognizable subtradition of its own, which in turn influenced even some nonspiritual autobiographical texts. The two recognized indigenous Arabic genres, self-sīra and self-tarjama, took on numerous modified forms in different social and literary contexts, but they continued to be understood by late medieval and premodern writers as constituting a single recognizable act of writing an account of one's life for posterity regardless of the formal differences in the resulting texts.

Notes