A'lam al-Nisa' fi Alamay al-Arab wa-al-Islam

A'lam al-Nisa' fi Alamay al-Arab wa-al-Islam ("Notable Women in the Arab and Islamic Worlds") is a biographical dictionary of famous women compiled by Umar Rida Kahhala, offered "to the speakers of Arabic" as a guide for anyone researching Arab and Muslim women. ¹

In his preface Kahhala says that a researcher on Arab or Muslim women meets an obstacle that only long digging in printed and manuscript books can overcome, so he tried to gather as many famous women as he could who left a mark in learning, civilisation, letters and the arts, in politics and power, in charity, and in religion and asceticism, "to lift the veil from the different roles women have played in the history of the Arabs and of Islam". ¹

He followed each entry with the sources he relied on, so that the reader may trust it, and arranged the women alphabetically like encyclopaedias and dictionaries, cross-referring names beginning with "Umm" or "Ibnat" and multiple names to the best-established and most common one. ^{1 2} In the enlarged edition he added women found after the first edition, some of them recently deceased, and he dated the preface in Damascus in 1379 AH / 1959 CE. ²

Entries range from a few lines on women hadith transmitters drawn from works such as al-Daw' al-Lami' and al-Tahbir, to long entries gathering reports and verse from al-Aghani, al-Tabari, Ibn Khallikan and others — the entry on al-Khansa' runs to ten pages and ends with some thirty sources. ^{3 4 5} Its women include queens and regents such as Arwa al-Sulayhiyya and Sitt al-Mulk, scholars such as Shuhda the Scribe and Zaynab bint al-Kamal, ascetics such as Rabi'a al-Adawiyya, and poets and singers such as Ulayya bint al-Mahdi and Azza al-Mayla'. ^{6 7 8 9 10 11}

The Mu'assasat al-Risala (Beirut) printing, "enlarged, with a supplement" ¹², which the imprint page of a second copy of vol. 1 identifies as the fifth edition (1984; see the source record); Kahhala says its first and second printings were due to the efforts of al-Maktaba al-Hashimiyya. ²

• Only volumes 1–3 (alif–'ayn) were used; volumes 4–5 are not among the available copies. Pages are PDF pages; printed = PDF − 4.