al-Wafi bi-l-Wafayat

الوافي بالوفيات

Al-Safadi's great biographical dictionary, arranged alphabetically in about thirty volumes; he split off the notables of his own lifetime into a separate six-volume work, A'yan al-'asr wa-a'wan al-nasr ¹. The Wafi remains indispensable to scholars; twenty-two edited volumes had appeared by 1993 ².