The
Fihrist indexes authors, together with biographical details and literary criticism. Ibn al-Nadim's interest ranges from religions, customs, sciences, with obscure facets of medieval Islamic history, works on superstition, magic, drama, poetry, satire and music from Persia, Babylonia, and Byzantium. The mundane, the bizarre, the prosaic and the profane. Ibn al-Nadim freely selected and catalogued the rich culture of his time from various collections and libraries. The order is primarily chronological and works are listed according to four internal orders: genre;
orfann (chapter);
maqala (discourse); the
Fihrist (the book as a whole). These four chronological principles of its underlying system help researchers to interpret the work, retrieve elusive information and understand Ibn al-Nadim's method of composition, ideology, and historical analyses. The
Fihrist shows the wealth, range and breadth of historical and geographical knowledge disseminated in the literature of the
Islamic Golden Age, from the modern to the ancient civilisations of
Syria,
Greece,
India,
Rome and
Persia. Little survives of the
Persian books listed by Ibn al-Nadim. The author's aim, set out in his preface, is to index all books in
Arabic, written by Arabs and others, as well as their scripts, dealing with various sciences, with accounts of those who composed them and the categories of their authors, together with their relationships, their times of birth, length of life, and times of death, the localities of their cities, their virtues and faults, from the beginning of the formation of science to this our own time (377 /987). An index as a literary form had existed as
tabaqat biographies. Contemporaneously in the western part of the empire in the
Umayyad seat of
Córdoba, the
Andalusian scholar
Abū Bakr al-Zubaydī, produced
Ṭabaqāt al-Naḥwīyīn wa-al-Lughawīyīn (‘Categories of Grammarians and Linguists’) a
biographic encyclopedia of early Arab philologists of the
Basran,
Kufan and
Baghdad schools of Arabic grammar and
tafsir (Quranic exegesis), which covers much of the same material covered in chapter II of the
Fihrist. ==Editions and chapters==