Index

Translation

The Index is a book written by the writer and biographer Al-Nadim, in which he collected all the Arabic books and articles published in his time, books on religions, jurisprudence, and law, and about famous kings, poets, scholars, and thinkers. He stated in his translation of Al-Marzbani that he was working on composing it in the year 377 AH, and he died in the year 385 AH, and he left in it a lot of writings, which the Moroccan vizier completed in the year (418 AH), but the vizier’s completion did not reach us, compared to what Yaqut reported from it. It seems that people quoted from it the accounts of some of Ibn al-Nadim’s contemporaries, such as Ibn Nubatah, who died a year later (400 AH), and Ibn Jinni in (392). In it, he divided the humanities into ten branches, the chapters of which captured the outcome of the Arab culture of his time. …