Writing Women in the Female-Only Biographical Dictionaries: Authorship and Authority in a Reinvented Genre

The study of history may be approached from a variety of perspectives: as a chronology of events, an analysis of physical artefacts, or the study of individuals or groups. It is with the lattermost of these that the Islamicate historiographical tradition is concerned in its conception of the biographical dictionary: a collection of self-contained biographies that encapsulate the lives of a selection of individuals. Hundreds of such dictionaries have been produced since the earliest eras of Islamicate history, presenting the lives of individuals from various groups and strata in society, from the scholars and elites of different time periods, disciplines, and regions, to collections on strange and eccentric individuals.
This approach to history has been adopted by numerous modern authors writing in a range of languages who seek to recover a history of women in the Islamicate world through the creation of dictionaries on exemplary female figures. Since the start of the nineteenth century, there have been more than 500 such dictionaries compiled – ultimately challenging the thesis of a socio-intellectual decline in the Islamicate world. My research studies these female-only dictionaries by tracing the trajectory of their precursor in the Islamicate biographical tradition before merging them under the newly conceptualised genre of Female-Only Biographical Dictionaries (FOBDs). These works present fascinating insights into the novel ways that the classical genre of the biographical dictionary is reshaped according to the exigencies and perspectives of a new age, (re)introducing to us incredible women from a diversity of times, places and social status. These FOBDs are divergent in the aims and methods of their authors, as well as the background contexts in which they operate, yet all may be united under a shared vision of an Islamicate Women’s Republic of Excellence, connecting a contemporary Islamicate world that is grappling with a complex gender discourse to a magnificently rich past of exemplary women. The present study identifies and examines this genre for the first time, through a representative selection of key works and exemplary and inspiring women.