If poetry is the “archive of the Arabs,” biography is the archive of the Muslims. Premodern Arabic literature contains biographies of hundreds of thousands of Muslims (and occasionally non-Muslims) from soldiers and scholars to lovers and lunatics. With this diversity of subjects comes a variety of forms, ranging from simple lists of names to elaborately detailed narratives. In a few cases, above all that of the Prophet Muḥammad, biographers strove for exhaustive coverage of a subject's life from birth to death. More commonly, they collected the names of all the notable men, and sometimes the notable women, who had lived in a certain town, practiced a single profession, or died in a particular century. The entries in such collections are often very short. However, the collections themselves are so large that historians have been able to mine them for information about kinship, marriage, political alliances, labor, social status, and the transmission of knowledge in premodern Muslim communities. Scholars of Arabic literature, for their part, have preferred to deal with single entries that contain descriptions, anecdotes, and lines of poetry. They have analyzed compilers' use of sources, traced changes in the representation of a single subject over time, and brought to light biographers' notions of plotting, characterization, and moral thematics.

Given the genre's diversity of form, one may wonder whether the term biography properly applies to it at all.