Sīra (Exemplary Life Story)

The sīra is the earliest of the full biographical forms, dating at least to the second Islamic century (eighth century) with the works of Ibn Isḥāq (d. 767) and Ibn Hishām (d. 828 or 833) on the Prophet Muhammad. Derived from the verb sāra, meaning “to go” or “to travel,” the noun sīra denoted a path or journey, one's manner of proceeding, and by extension, the behavior or conduct of an individual.^[10] It eventually came to mean a biography, in particular that of the Prophet Muhammad. The form soon came to serve as a vehicle for the retelling of other famous lives, such as Ibn Shaddād's sīra of Saladin (Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī), Badr al-Dīn al-‘Aynī's biography of the Mamluk sultan al-Mu’ayyad, al-Sayf al-muhannad fīsīrat al-malik al-Mu’ayyad (The Fine Indian Blade on the Life of King al-Mu’ayyad), and many others.

The sīra thus became an independent work devoted to the biography of an individual; although there are far fewer of these texts than the hundreds of thousands of shorter biographical notices that have come down to us, they still constitute a sizable body of literature. In addition, the term sīra appears to have carried the connotation of an exemplary life, such as that of the Prophet Muhammad or his son-in-law, ‘Alī, and in certain later periods is found predominantly among Shi‘ite writers. In the late medieval and premodern periods, the title manāqib (virtues) became the most common term for single-subject biographies of religious exemplars. Despite the change in nomenclature, manāqib works often proceeded in the manner of a sīra, documenting the subject's career from birth to death using eyewitness testimony and lists of teachers, students, family members, and works composed.

The term sīra grew to encompass autobiographies as well, as seen in the case of the work of another al-Mu’ayyad, al-Mu’ayyad al-Shīrāzī (d. 1077), who recounts the events of his own life, although it is difficult to determine whether the title Sīrat al-Mu’ayyad was originally used by the author or applied to the text by later copyists. In any case, the two types of sīra, biographical and autobiographical, were not initially distinguished from one another. The genre, as such, consisted of the literary representation of a life as a subgenre of history and did not differentiate between first-person and third-person texts; and as some autobiographical texts were also written in the third person, the texts themselves were at times not formally different. Although a sīra might be given a formal, often flowery, title when composed, it later often came to be known simply as “The Sīra of so-and-so” in medieval bibliographies, indexes, and cross-references in other works.^[11]

The term sīra in reference to an independent auto/biographical text became less and less common over the centuries (with the exception of its continual use in reference to the biography of the Prophet), and fifteenth-and sixteenth-century writers such as al-Suyūṭī, Ibn Ṭūlūn, and al-Sha‘rānī do not even mention it in their discussions of autobiography. One reason for this disappearance may be that by this later period the term sīra had also come to designate a genre of folk epic, such as the epics of the poet-warrior ‘Antar ibn Shaddād, the heroine Dhāt al-Himma, and the Bedouin tribe of the Banī Hilāl.^[12] This extension of the term may well have grown out of the idea of the exemplary life, for the genre consists primarily of highly romanticized accounts of larger-than-life heroes and their adventures. The term was revived in the twentieth century, however, in modern Arabic both as a term for biography and as part of a compound neologism, al-sīra al-dhātiyya (self-sīra), now the most common term for autobiography.

Most Arabic biographical writings from the early medieval to the modern period, however, do not take the form of independent works, that is, as individual sīras (Ar. pl. siyar), but rather in various forms of biographical collections and anthologies. The production of biographical dictionaries (ṭabaqāt ), annalistic histories (tawārīkh), which included biographical notices, and biographical materials preserved in anecdotal form (akhbār) reached stupendous proportions during the Islamic Middle Ages. Some of the larger biographical compendiums contain well over ten thousand biographical notices, and the number of compendiums themselves is in the thousands. Biographical writing was for centuries one of the most widespread genres of Arabic literature.^[13]