This paper examines the role of the middling and non-elite ulama in the social and intellectual life of eighteenth century Ottoman Damascus. The scholarly class of eighteenth century Damascus has often been treated as a contiguous social category and as a somewhat homogeneous community of social actors. Our knowledge of Damascene scholars is limited to a few elite scholars who have so far received the vast majority of attention. It is their history that has come to define the history of the scholarly community as a whole. However, the Damascene scholarly community of the eighteenth century was far from homogenous. The majority of scholars did not belong to, or identify with the elite. This paper therefore aims to reveal the intricate social and identitarian divisions that constituted the Damascene scholarly community in the eighteenth century. These divisions are examined through a careful linguistic and prosopographic analysis of biographical and autobiographical literature. While such biographical literature has been mined for the information and statistics it affords for specific individuals and social groups, only rarely has it been used as a historical artifact in itself. This paper approaches biographical dictionaries and autobiographies as social as well as literary spaces in which one can glean new insight into the implicit social ordering of society. As such the paper categorizes the ulama in the sources according to their career trajectory, their socioeconomic status, their reputation among other scholars, the manifest effects of their intellectual production, and the language used to identify them. The picture that has emerged is that of a scholarly community that was segmented according to a complex combination of social, economic, regional, and intellectual factors. More importantly this method has helped shed light on the collective lives of the often forgotten middling, impoverished, and failed scholars whose minimal achievements and reputation has excluded them from studies on the period.