Biographical literature

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521838245.020

18 - Biographical literature

from PART III - LITERATURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2011

Michael Cooperson

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Robert Irwin

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Robert Irwin: Affiliation:
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

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Much of the so-called biographical literature in classical Arabic, Persian and Turkic has little in common with modern biography. Most of the pre-modern examples consist of short entries collected together in so-called biographical dictionaries. To modern readers such entries seem oddly uninformative. An entry on a poet, for example, may contain extensive citations of his or her verses, but practically nothing about his life. An entry on a jurist, similarly, will list his teachers and students, his works and his date of death; but it will not report his reasons for embarking upon the study of the law, or attempt to account for his professional successes and failures by referring to his quirks of personality. Because of these differences, some modern scholars refer to entries in collective works as ‘prosopography’, reserving the term ‘biography’ only for stand-alone works devoted to a single subject. Yet even the biographies proper display little interest in how the subject ‘came to be who he was’. His character is tacitly assumed to be fixed, and the succession of anecdotes merely displays it from different points of view.

Type: Chapter
Information: The New Cambridge History of Islam , pp. 458 - 473

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521838245.020 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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