The History of the Caliphs pdf download

The History of the Caliphs by Suyuti

The History of the Caliphs

Extensive as is the reputation of as Suyuti as a distinguished author 

and scholar, and unsurpassed for the number and range of the works which 

in every branch of literature known to his age, his unwearied pen never 

ceased to produce, 

we are indebted to the malice or envy of but one of his 

contemporaries and to his own testimony, for the few details of his life 

and studies that we possess. 

Reference to one or other of his multitudinous volumes is made by writers of his own and succeeding times where the kindred subject of which they treat naturally calls for it, but only one 

contemporary biographical notice of him besides his own, is extant.

 To these I shall presently refer. 

Haji Khalifah, at the close of his Lexicon, gives a detailed list of as Suynti’s works, prefaced hy a column of laudatory epithets which have less 

the ring of sincere admiration than of conventional panegyric,

 yet wonder or his envy might well offer the incense of adulation to the astonishing author of five hundred and four volumes. 

Kuranic exegesis, Tradition and its cognate subjects, jurisprudence, philology, rhetoric, prose 

and poetical composition, the phenomena of nature, curiosities of literature, discourses on social questions, criticism, history, biography, all these were fields not too vast for his discursive intelligence and none too minute for his indefatigable industry.

 Some of his compositions are indeed, nothing more than pamphlets of smaller compass than many an article of a modern Review, but a considerable number, to judge from some of those, about one-fifth of the whole, that have come down to us, must have been of goodly hulk. 

It would doubtless have been better for his reputation as it would assuredly have been more profitable to the generality of his readers, had he confined his labours to the production of a few works of universal interest and written for posterity rather than for his day. 

By far the greater part of his writings were on subjects which have no interest to a European 

student. Two hundred and six works on Tradition and ninety-one on Jurisprudence would, it might be supposed, have heen thoroughly exhaustive had not another line been previously written regarding them, yet this