Tarikh al-Islam
- Author died
- 748 AH
- Editions
- t Tadmuri · T al-Tawfiqiyya · +1
Tarikh al-Islam (Tarikh al-Islam wa-wafayat al-mashahir wa-l-a'lam, "The History of Islam and the Deaths of Famous and Prominent Figures") is an extensive universal chronicle and biographical dictionary by the Syrian hadith master and historian Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi (673–748 AH / 1274–1348 CE), chronicling the political events and notable figures of the Muslim world from the Prophet's migration (the Hijra) to the year 700 AH .
Scope and Contents
Tarikh al-Islam is al-Dhahabi's largest historical composition, encompassing seven full centuries of Islamic history across the regions spanning from al-Andalus in the west to the eastern frontiers . The work records approximately 40,000 biographical entries alongside major annual political developments and dynasty transitions .
Its biographical coverage is broad, documenting caliphs, sultans, military commanders, viziers, judges, Quran reciters, hadith scholars, jurists, men of letters, poets, grammarians, historians, ascetics, philosophers, and theologians, while giving particular prominence to traditionists and hadith transmitters . Although focused primarily on prominent figures, averaging around sixty biographies per year and exceeding one hundred in certain years, it also preserves records of lesser-known transmitters not found in earlier biographical works such as those of al-Khatib al-Baghdadi and Ibn Asakir .
Structure and Method
Al-Dhahabi opens the book with the Prophet's military campaigns (al-Maghazi), followed by the Prophetic biography (al-Sira al-Nabawiyya), and the era of the Rightly Guided Caliphs (al-Khulafa al-Rashidun) .
The remainder of the work combines an annalistic chronicle with a generational (tabaqat) framework, divided into seventy classes (tabaqat), each spanning a ten-year decade (‘aqd) from 1 AH to 700 AH . Within each decade, al-Dhahabi records the yearly political events and arranges the biographical notices of individuals who died during that span alphabetically by name . Al-Dhahabi adopted ten-year units partly to accommodate conflicting source reports regarding exact death years, such as differing transmissions concerning the obituaries of Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib and Urwa ibn al-Zubayr . In entries for hadith transmitters, he prefixed symbols (rumuz) indicating which canonical hadith collections documented their narrations .
Reception and Continuations
The contemporary jurist Ibn al-Zamlakani read the entire multi-volume work sequentially from start to finish and praised it . Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani noted that al-Dhahabi surpassed his predecessors in compiling Tarikh al-Islam, particularly in his rigorous verification of the accounts of hadith scholars .
Ibn Qadi Shuhba (d. 851 AH) wrote a continuation (Dhayl) that began where al-Dhahabi concluded at the start of 701 AH and extended into the year 806 AH . An abridgment of the work was made by Ibn al-Mulla under the title al-Muntaqa min Tarikh al-Islam .
Manuscripts and Editions
Complete single manuscript sets of Tarikh al-Islam were historically rare; extant manuscript volumes were distributed among repositories including the Hagia Sophia (Aya Sofya) Library in Istanbul, Hyderabad in India, and the Egyptian National Library (Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya) in Cairo .
The work has been published in modern printed editions, notably a 52-volume edition edited by Umar Abd al-Salam Tadmuri (Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, Beirut) and an edition edited by Bashar Awwad Ma'ruf (Dar al-Gharb al-Islami, 2003) .
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