Classical Arabic biography

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"Pre-modern Arabic biography has served as a major source for the history of Islamic civilization. In the first book-length study in English to explore the origins and development of classical Arabic biography, Michael Cooperson demonstrates how Muslim scholars used the notions of heirship and transmission to document the activities of political, scholarly and religious communities. The author also explains how medieval Arab writers used biography to tell the life-stories of important historical figures by examining the careers of the Abbasid Caliph al-Ma'mun, the Shiite Imam Ali al-Rida, the Sunni scholar Ahmad Ibn Hanbal and the ascetic Bishr al-Hafi. The study reconstructs the career of each figure from his own biographies, as well as from the biographies of the others. Drawing on anthropology and comparative religion, as well as history and literary criticism, the book offers an account of how each figure responded to the presence of the others and how these responses were preserved or rewritten by posterity."--BOOK JACKET.