Abū Manṣūr al-Thaʿālibī

Reference note, paraphrased from Tevfik Rüştü Topuzoğlu’s TDV biography: Abū Manṣūr ʿAbd al-Malik ibn Muḥammad al-Thaʿālibī was born in Nishapur in 961 and died in 1038. He was a scholar of Arabic language and literature and a poet. He worked as a teacher early in life and later travelled among centres of learning and court patronage. He wrote in Arabic, although he knew Persian. His collections preserved literary material and information about writers of his period. Yatīmat al-dahr influenced later biographical anthologies. Do not confuse him with the Quran commentator al-Thaʿlabī.

Reference note, paraphrased from C. E. Bosworth’s Bukhara article: Bukhara became a cultural centre for Arabic learning and New Persian literature under the Samanids. Al-Thaʿālibī praised the city in the introduction to the Bukhara section of Yatīmat al-dahr. Iranica identifies the original location as volume IV, page 101 in the Cairo 1956–58 edition, with a translation in E. G. Browne’s Literary History of Persia, volume I, pages 365–66. This corroborates the context of the X quotation; different English translations use different wording. These are references to works outside the two supplied books.