خلاصه ماشینی:
Ad-durar al-Kaminah (The Hidden Pearls) : thus Ibn Hajar al-tAsqalani entitles his biographical dictionary of men and women of the eighth century of the Hijr ah concerning whom he was able to obtain any information from many sources.
This propensity of Ibn Hajar is pointed out by Sakhawi on several occasions in the margins, and he also corrects at times bad errors of the author as regards names of persons and dates.
This manuscript contains unfortunately only the first volume, while the second one is supplied by a later copyist who had a very good original, but made his work easy by leav• ing out many biographies and copying only part of those which he includes.
Men of all these lands came to Cairo as the fountain-head of learning, and the centre of the whole picture is the Mamluk Sulta• nate of Egypt and Syria of which practically the first half of the century is occupied by the reign of the Malik an-Nasir, while the second half presents the sad picture of eight descendants of an-Nasir following one another iIJ.
He had a complete copy of this work brought by a son of the author to Egypt ; but he had a number of other sources and, for the time after the composition of · the I hatah, his information is derived from reports of immigrants and pilgrims who came to Cairo.