Muḥammad ibn Ḥabīb (d. 860), a specialist in Arab history, tribal genealogy, and poetry, who lived in Baghdad, collected in his Prominent Murder Victims many stories of murderers and murder victims from the legendary pre-Islamic past, such as how Bilqīs, the Arabic name for the Queen of Sheba, came to power, to the assassinations ordered by viziers or caliphs in the early Islamic centuries.

A lengthy appendix deals with poets from pre- and early Islamic times who were killed. The stories are entertaining as well as informative. Strikingly, the author refrains from explicit moralising.

The present online publication offers a richly annotated English translation together with an improved Arabic text and indexes of persons, places, and rhymes.

All those interested in the political, cultural, and literary history of the Arabs and early Islam, as well as in comparative literature, will find this work invaluable; and all those who like to read murder stories.

This edition has been edited and translated by Geert Jan van Gelder (b. Amsterdam, 1947, PhD Leiden, 1982), Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford from 1998 until 2012. He published several monographs, editions, translations, and many articles on Classical Arabic Literature.