IBN KHALLIKAN’S BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY.

In the name of God, the Merciful, the Clement! Thus saith the needy, suppliant for the mercy of the Most High, Shams addin Abd ’l-Abbas Ahmad. Ibn Muhammad Ibn Ibrahim Ibn Abi-Bakr Ibn Khallikan, follower of the sect of as-Shafi:

Praise be to God, to whom alone belongeth the attribute of eternal existence; who hath passed on his creatures the doom of death, and prescribed to all living beings a certain term, beyond which they cannot pass when once it is expired; who, in this sentence, hath dealt equally between the noble and the lowly-born^ the powerful and the weak:

to him do I give praise for his abundant favours and his gifts pure (from ill); such praise as a man can offer who avoweth his inability to reach even the lowest strain of (fitting) eulogy: I bear witness that there is no god but the only God, who hath no partner (in his power); such witness as a man can bear who showeth at all times a sincere heart, and who hopeth in the mercy of his Lord, morning and evening:

I bear witness that Muhammad, his servant and apostle, is the most excellent of the prophets, the most noble of the saints; and that it is he who inviteth. td; walk’ in the white path (of salvation): God grant to him and to his famiy of illustrious princes such blessings as may endure while heaven and earth do last; God be gracious to his wives, and to his holy and pious companions.

The motive which induced me to compose this work, forming an historical compendium, was this: I had always been intent on studying the history of those men of renown who lived before my time; I was desirous of knowing the dates of their birth and death, and of learning who among them lived within the limits of each separate, century.

The results which I obtained incited me to increase the stock which I had acquired, and to redouble my researches; I applied my mind therefore to the study of works written specially on the subject, and gathered, from the mouths of the masters versed in this science, that information which I could not find in books;

I persevered in this pursuit till I had amassed a large quantity of documents roughly drawn up, which contained the events of a great number of years; I had also another portion of these facts impressed on my memory. It so happened, however, that when I had to recur to my notes, I could not find what I sought unless with some difficulty, because they were not regularly arranged; I was therefore obliged to class them,

and I adopted the alphabetical order, judging it more convenient than the chronological. In this I made it a rule to give the first place to those names which begin with a hamza, and the next to those in which the second letter is a hamza, or the nearest to it in order;

thus, I put the word Ibrahim before Ahmad, because the letter 6 stands nearer to the hamza than the letter h. This plan I followed up to the last, so that my work might be more easily consulted;

it led, however, to the necessity of placing (in some instances, the life of) a modern before that of an ancient, and of inserting the name of one person between those of two others who belong to a different class; but the convenience (I aimed at) rendered this unavoidable.

I have not assigned a place in this compendium to the companions of Muhammad, or to the Tabis; a few only excepted, whose history many persons require to know;