Hadiyat al-Arifin Asma al-Muallifin wa Athar al-Musannifin
- Author died
- 1339 AH
- Editions
- Hadiyat al-Arifin Asma al-Muallifin wa Athar al-Musannifin
Hadiyat al-Arifin Asma al-Muallifin wa Athar al-Musannifin (Gift of the Knowers: Names of Authors and Works of Writers) is a two-volume Arabic bio-bibliographical dictionary by Ismail Pasha al-Babani (d. 1339 AH / 1920 CE) cataloging Muslim scholars and their writings from early Islam down to the author's era .
Purpose and Scope
The dictionary was compiled to record authors from the inception of Islamic writing onward, citing their given names, agnomens (kunyas), titles (alqab), death dates, and works . In total, the compilation encompasses entries for approximately 10,000 authors and mentions around 50,000 book titles across Islamic disciplines .
Structure and Method
Al-Babani organized the work alphabetically according to the authors' primary given names (ism), rather than by their honorific titles or kunyas . Within groups of scholars who share identical given names, entries are ordered chronologically by the year of death, regardless of the names of their fathers or grandfathers . Under each author's entry, individual book titles are arranged alphabetically by title . To aid searchers who may not know a figure's exact date of death, the author placed the better-known nicknames, titles, and kunyas of scholars to the right of their names, allowing for scanning across shared entries .
Preservation and Publication
Following al-Babani's death, his manuscripts—including Hadiyat al-Arifin and his bibliographical supplement Idah al-Maknun fi al-Dhayl ala Kashf al-Zunun—were kept by his family and later acquired by the Turkish government . Hadiyat al-Arifin was officially printed in Istanbul by the Ministry of Education (Wikalat al-Ma'arif) in two volumes between 1951 and 1955 .
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