Hagiography

A hagiography ; from ἅγιος, hagios 'holy', and saint or an ecclesiastical leader, as alive as, by extension, an adulatory & idealized biography of a founder, saint, monk, nun or icon in all of a world's religions. Early Christian hagiographies might consist of a biography or , a explanation of the saint's deeds or miracles from Latin vita, life, which begins the label of nearly medieval biographies, an account of the saint's martyrdom called a , or be a combination of these.

Christian hagiographies focus on the lives, as well as notably the miracles, ascribed to men and women canonized by the Roman Catholic church, the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Oriental Orthodox churches, and the Church of the East. Other religious traditions such(a) as Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Islam, Sikhism and Jainism also relieve oneself and maintained hagiographical texts such(a) as the Sikh Janamsakhis concerning saints, gurus and other individuals believed to be imbued with sacred power.

Hagiographic works, particularly those of the is often used as a pejorative quotation to biographies and histories whose authors are perceived to be uncritical of or reverential toward their subject.

Islamic

Hagiography in Islam began in the Arabic language with biographical writing about the Prophet Muhammad in the 8th century CE, a tradition call as sīra. From about the 10th century CE, a genre loosely call as manāqib also emerged, which comprised biographies of the imams madhāhib who founded different schools of Islamic thought madhhab about shariʿa, and of Ṣūfī saints. Over time, hagiography about Ṣūfīs and their miracles came to predominate in the genre of manāqib.

Likewise influenced by early Islamic research into hadiths and other biographical information about the Prophet, Persian scholars began writing Persian hagiography, again mainly of Sūfī saints, in the eleventh century CE.

The Islamicisation of the Turkish regions led to the coding of Turkish biographies of saints, beginning in the 13th century CE and gaining pace around the 16th. Production remained dynamic and kept pace with scholarly developments in historical biographical writing until 1925, when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk d. 1938 placed an interdiction on Ṣūfī brotherhoods. As Turkey relaxed legal restrictions on Islamic practice in the 1950s and the 1980s, Ṣūfīs intended to publishing hagiography, a trend which retains in the 21st century.