This introduction to Section 6 of the volume on alternative sources for the study of Islamic law explores how the subject can be approached through material that is not strictly legally-focused, including such diverse genres as biographical dictionaries, licenses to teach and issue legal verdicts (pl. ijāzāt) speeches, pamphlets and novels, as well as including a representative bibliography of recent scholarship on the subject.

This chapter focuses on several short biographies excerpted from Persian Shīʿī biographical dictionary Rayḥānat al-Adab fī Tarājim al-Maʿrūfīn bi-l-Kunyā wa-l-Laqab (‘The Sweet Basil of Learning, concerning the biographies - tarājim - of the well-known, ordered by teknonym and nickname’) by the modern author Mīrzā Muḥammad Mudarris Khayābānī (d. 1373/1954). The work as a whole contains 4,624 biographies, arranged, alphabetically, but also by the various naming methods in Arabic. The selection presented in this chapter provides the reader with examples of unremarkable biographical entries, in the sense that the scholars are not controversial or problematic for the tradition in the view of the biographer.