Al-Safadi

Salah al-Din Khalil ibn Aybak al-Safadi was among the most prolific and accomplished men of letters of the later Mamluk age, a biographer, anthologist, poet, and historian whose vast labors preserved the memory of countless figures of the medieval Islamic world. He was born around the year 696 of the Hijra, corresponding to roughly 1297 of the common era, in the town of Safad in the highlands of Galilee, from which town he took the name by which posterity knows him. His father, Aybak, bears a name of Turkish form common among the military men of the Mamluk Sultanate, and the family belonged to that milieu of soldiers and administrators who served the state that then ruled Egypt and Syria.

Al-Safadi grew up in Syria during the heyday of the Mamluk Sultanate, the powerful regime founded by manumitted slave-soldiers that had repelled the Mongols at the battle of Ayn Jalut and brought the Crusader presence in the Levant to an end. It was an age in which Cairo and Damascus shone as centers of learning, architecture, and patronage, where scholars gathered in the great mosques and colleges and where the chancery, the administrative heart of the state, employed men of literary cultivation. Into this world the young Khalil entered, and his early interests, by his own later account, inclined first toward the visual arts and calligraphy before he turned his energies fully to the pen and the pursuit of knowledge.

He devoted himself to the study of the Arabic language, its grammar and rhetoric, to literature and poetry, and to the religious sciences and history that formed the curriculum of the educated. He had the great fortune to study under and associate with some of the most eminent scholars of his generation. Among his teachers and companions were towering figures of fourteenth-century learning, and his contact with them shaped both his learning and his lifelong devotion to the gathering of knowledge about men of letters and their works. He pursued the hearing of hadith and obtained licenses of transmission from numerous authorities, and he traveled in the course of his studies and his official duties between the cities of Syria and Egypt, including Damascus, Cairo, Aleppo, and other centers.

Like many cultivated men of his time, al-Safadi made his living in the service of the state, holding a succession of posts in the financial and chancery administration of the Mamluk government. He worked in the bureaus that managed the army's affairs and the correspondence of the state in several Syrian cities, and these positions, far from hindering his scholarship, brought him into contact with officials, scholars, poets, and travelers from across the Islamic world, furnishing him with both the leisure and the material for his immense literary output. The administrative career of the educated secretary and the vocation of the scholar were, in his case as in many others of the age, mutually nourishing.

The achievement upon which al-Safadi's fame most securely rests is his enormous biographical dictionary titled al-Wafi bi-al-Wafayat, which may be rendered The Complete Compendium of Obituaries or The Comprehensive Book of Deaths. It is one of the largest biographical works in the Arabic language, a vast collection of notices on thousands of individuals, arranged according to a system of his own devising that combined alphabetical order with attention to names and patronymics. In it he gathered biographies of caliphs, sultans, princes, viziers, judges, scholars of every science, poets, physicians, mystics, and notable men and women of all kinds, from the earliest period of Islam down to his own day. For each he sought to record the essential facts of life and death, the teachers and students, the works composed, and where possible specimens of poetry or memorable sayings, so that the work is at once a reference of dates and a treasury of literary fragments.

The value of al-Wafi to later scholarship is difficult to overstate. Al-Safadi drew upon a great range of earlier sources, many of which have since been lost, and by quoting and summarizing them he preserved a wealth of information that would otherwise have vanished. He was a careful and conscientious compiler who often named his sources and indicated where reports differed, and his own wide reading and acquaintance allowed him to add original observations, particularly for the figures of his own century whom he had known or whose contemporaries he had met. The work became a foundational quarry for every later biographer and historian who wrote in Arabic, and it remains in active use among modern scholars of Islamic history, literature, and the sciences as a primary source for the lives of medieval figures.

Beyond this monumental dictionary, al-Safadi composed a second important biographical work, Ayan al-Asr wa-Awan al-Nasr, devoted specifically to the notable contemporaries of his own age, a book of great value precisely because its author wrote of people he had himself known or who lived within living memory, giving it the freshness of near-contemporary testimony. His pen ranged far more widely still. He was a poet of recognized skill and a master of the ornate epistolary prose prized in the chanceries of his day, and he wrote extensively on the art of rhetorical figures and wordplay. He produced a notable treatise on the puns, double meanings, and verbal artifices of which the literature of his age was fond, and another celebrated work, al-Ghayth al-Musajjam, a learned commentary upon a famous philosophical poem on the lament for the dead, in which he poured out a flood of erudition on language, history, anecdote, and lore.

He also wrote works on themes that delighted the cultivated readers of his time. He composed a treatise gathering the biographies and verse of men who were blind, celebrating their attainments, and another, half-witty and half-learned, on the theme of the beauty spot, weaving together poetry, anecdote, and erudition around a single conceit in the manner beloved by the literary salons of the Mamluk era. These works display the breadth of his curiosity, his command of the literary heritage, and the playful inventiveness that coexisted in him with the patient diligence of the great compiler.

Al-Safadi spent his later years chiefly in Damascus, where he held administrative office and continued his unceasing labors of reading, writing, and copying, for he was also known as a skilled scribe who produced manuscripts in his own elegant hand. He died in Damascus in the year 764 of the Hijra, corresponding to 1363, during one of the recurrent visitations of plague that swept the region in that century, leaving behind a body of work of remarkable size and variety, the fruit of a life given wholly to letters.

The legacy of al-Safadi rests above all on the role of the biographer as the guardian of memory. In an age before printing, when the record of a person's life and achievements depended upon the diligence of compilers who gathered, preserved, and transmitted such notices, his vast dictionaries served as a great reservoir into which the lives of an entire civilization were poured and from which later generations could draw. Without his patient industry, much of what we know of the scholars, poets, and notables of the medieval Islamic world would be irretrievably lost. He stands as a supreme example of the encyclopedic spirit of his age, the conviction that knowledge of men and their works is itself a science worthy of a lifetime's devotion, and his books remain, centuries after his death, indispensable to all who would study the civilization he so faithfully chronicled.