In his "Graphs, Maps, Trees" Franco Moretti offers an approach of "distant reading" as a means for tracing the evolution of the novel in Europe. Moretti's provocative approach prompts an important question: Can we trace the development of Arabic written tradition in a similar manner? The question is essentially about data and method. Both are available. Arabists are blessed with sources that provide sufficient data for such a study: one of such sources is the "Hadiyyat al-'arifin," a biobibliographical collection that was composed by the Ottoman officer Isma'il Pasha Baghdatli (d. 1920). This collection is invaluable: covering almost 13 centuries of Islamic history, it includes short biographical records on slightly over 8,800 authors, listing perhaps about 50,000 works altogether. Although hardly an exciting read, the biobibliographical records of this collection are brief and structurally very similar what makes them ideal data for computational reading. Based on the algorithmic transformation of the text, this method allows surpassing the limitations of traditional approaches, and opens the door to effectively applying Moretti's approach to the wealth of Arabic/Islamic written legacy. After the general exposition of the method of computational reading, paper will offer preliminary results of the "distant reading" of this collection, which will be visualized with graphs and geographical maps.