Scope, Method, and Literary Character

Wafayat al-A'yan represents a departure from the strictly scholarly orientation of most Islamic biographical dictionaries. Ibn Khallikan wrote for an educated literate audience that valued not only factual information but literary quality, and he composed his entries with careful attention to prose style, narrative interest, and the preservation of witty sayings, poetic citations, and engaging anecdotes.

His criterion for inclusion was notable achievement in any field recognized by the educated culture of his era: scholarship in the religious sciences, poetry, literature, administration, military leadership, and governance. This broad criterion gave Wafayat al-A'yan a cross-disciplinary scope unusual for biographical dictionaries of its era, making it a reference not only for scholars of the Islamic sciences but for anyone interested in the cultural history of the Islamic world.

Each entry typically provides: the subject's full name and kunya, the precise date and place of birth, a description of the subject's career and achievements, literary quotations (including the subject's own poetry if they were a poet or the poetry of others about them), notable sayings, and the precise date and circumstances of death. Ibn Khallikan's attention to precise dates — he was notably careful about verifying death dates, a concern that other biographers were more casual about — gives his dictionary a precision that later scholars valued.

The literary quality of Wafayat al-A'yan is one of its most distinctive features. Ibn Khallikan wrote in classical Arabic prose of elegance and clarity, and his biographical essays often have a narrative momentum and descriptive vividness that distinguishes them from the more formulaic entries of strictly scholarly biographical works. His descriptions of notable figures — their physical appearance, their intellectual character, their personal habits — have a concreteness and life that academic biography rarely achieves.

His preservation of poetry — his entries for major poets include extensive quotations from their work — makes Wafayat al-A'yan an important anthology of classical Arabic and Persian poetry as well as a biographical dictionary.