The "Golden Sample" Companions (https://eis1600.github.io/MFBFA/)

ONLINE ACCESS: https://eis1600.github.io/MFBFA/

The «Golden Sample» companion includes 2,109 biographies that al-Ḏahabī (d. 748/1347) borrowed from his Andalusian sources. The original and borrowed biographies are displayed side by side, with matching text highlighted to illustrate both similarities and differences. You can access any pair of biographies either via the navigation buttons at the bottom of the page or by entering the special five-letter ID in the search field. I will discuss below how these pairs were identified. The color-coded text is designed to facilitate close reading.The «Biographical Corpus» companion includes approximately 37,300 biographies from the four texts used in this project: Taʾrīḫ al-ʿulamāʾ by Ibn al-Faraḍī (d. 403/1013) with 1,659 biographies; Kitāb al-Ṣilaŧ by Ibn Baškuwāl (d. 578/1183) with 1,543 biographies; al-Takmilaŧ li-Kitāb al-Ṣilaŧ by Ibn al-Abbār (d. 658/1260) with 3,580 biographies; and the complete Taʾrīḫ al-islām by al-Ḏahabī (d. 748/1347) with 30,491 biographies. The corpus is fully searchable in both Arabic and a Buckwalter-like transliteration, which is explained in the companion. This transliteration system "simplifies" certain aspects of Arabic orthography, particularly hamzaŧs above or below alifs. For example, searching for "Aḥmad" in Arabic requires trying different forms of alif, whereas in this transliteration, AHmd retrieves all variations. Additionally, the companion provides detailed search summaries and is designed to contrast vocabulary usage between al-Ḏahabī and his Andalusian sources.The «Omitted Biographies» companion includes 47 biographies from the longest 450 (150 from each Andalusian source) that al-Ḏahabī chose not to include in his Taʾrīḫ al-Islām. This companion provides analytical summaries detailing how each omitted biography differs from those that al-Ḏahabī selected within this sample of the longest 450 biographies.