ISSN 2412-3196
Online Edition
ISBN 978-3-7001-9277-0
Online Edition
ABSTRACT
This article investigates and compares the origins, intentions and contents of two biographical collections from South Arabia. The first, al-Sulūk fī ṭabaqāt al-ʿulamā ̉ wa-l-mulūk, was written by al-Janadī, who held important legal and administrative positions for the Rasūlid court during the first part of the 8th/14th century. This collection mainly emerges from an earlier Yemeni historiographical work, which described the lives of religious figures in South Arabia in the Islamic period, but sees new entries being added from the author’s own research and time. It encompasses both the lives of learned men and of political dignitaries and overall aimed to induce readers to remember and imitate the exemplary lives found in the history of al-Janadī’s beloved Yemen. The second collection, Ṭabaqāt al-khawāṣṣ ahl al-ṣidq wa-l-ikhlāṣ, was composed by al-Sharjī, a 9th/15th-century legal scholar who was motivated by his visitations of the graves of Sufis in Yemen as well as by the observation that these individuals had been left out of previous collections describing the Sufis in other parts of the Islamic world. As a result, he utilised the earlier Yemeni biographical collections, including al-Janadī’s, to put together a representation of the lives of the Sufis of South Arabia. Towards the end of this article there is a detailed comparison made between the alternative biographies of the same man found in the two collections, thus illustrating the differences apparent in the respective foci of these two historians.