Sīrah Sherif Abdelkarim (bio) Sīrah (pl. siyar) means path in Arabic and refers to a character's behavior, history, or biography.1 The genre that goes by the same name is just as far-reaching and includes romances, biographies, and something between history and fantasy. Subjects include prophets, kings, commanders, and cities, and registers range from high to low style, erring on the side of the vernacular. On paper, so to speak, most siyar—especially the romances—appear oppressively formulaic, inartful, and long.2 They were never made for silent reading, however, nor were they read or heard from cover to cover over a session or two.3 Audiences instead received them in bite-sized installments, the very sort that frame tales are designed to deliver. Bridget Connelly articulates how an itinerant storyteller (rāwī, or fḍāwī) would relate his tales: The primary means of obtaining money was to build suspense gradually as the crowd grew; then, with the hero almost at the sword of his enemy (and the crowd at its numerical peak), the fḍāwī would stop the narration and collect a few millièmes before going on. … The storyteller ensured a constant audience over a long period of time… by presenting a serial-like continuation of particular tales at special times and places each day over several months. … In the case of some narratives … a skilled storyteller well versed in his tradition could stretch the episodes out over a year, while maintaining an interested and paying audience.4 Audiences thus experienced an epic, such as the life of al-Ẓāhir Baybars (d.1277), in soundbites. Like other folk works, the siyar comprise scores of sections that contain their own frames for episodic delivery. The functional brevity of these long forms has given this otherwise unwieldy genre continued relevance in the forms of condensed books and various serialized productions for radio and television. As for the original performances of these siyar, their skillful and inventive rehearsal by folk poets liberates a static text, such that the dull reading now sounds rhythmic, especially when set to music. This performability accounts for the substantive variants of these epics' many manuscripts and the heterogenous nature of their cultural spinoffs and parallels.5 [End Page 327] Each of the siyar lies on a spectrum of fictionality: moral outcomes seep out of questionable events. Each gives us a glimpse into the popular imaginations, anxieties, and conflicts of its age (e.g., Umayyad, Ayyubid, Mamluk): hostile forces teem at home and more so abroad in storylands.6 As sensationalist chronicles, the siyar rely on notable military campaigns for their plots, and star armed and dangerous warlords—tenacious Muslims, out for blood, but courageous, favored. These figures aren't uncomplicated in their own right, but you wouldn't seek them out for their roundness, and across their folktales, both they and their errands can seem interchangeable.7 The style and syntax don't always aspire too high, so you can't blame the orientalists for faulting this genre as falling short of the standards of the famous oral epics or the "educated standards" of belles-lettres.8 Native critics of the folk epics in particular cite deeper and harsher shortcomings, ascribing their continued renditions to a united Arab inferiority complex: their delusions of grandeur, their backwardness.9 Yet the scholars undervalue these stories' popularity; they overlook the fact that these folk epics are for a people, by a people, and accordingly reflect that people's norms and tastes, however "unlettered." They were not made for Arabists. One of the siyar's aesthetic features—its poetry—gives credence to the genre's literary appeal, if not its sophistication. Across the siyar, poetry captures the sweep of the history covered; they might not weigh as much as charters and treaties, but the verses turn history into art, and are themselves cultural artifacts.10 A welcome interruption from prosy narratives, often composed in stubborn saj' (rhyming prose), poems equate with contemporary headlines or highlight reels, and organize and punctuate a sīrah's narrative progression. They paraphrase or commemorate a notable event; evoke an emotion (a character's pride, rage, or grief); disclose a significant...