Fictionalizing the Past is a short edited volume of papers arising out of a workshop held at the Netherlands-Flemish Institute in Cairo in 2007 in honour of Remke Kruk, who herself contributes an article on the depiction of divided loyalties between Umayyads and Abbasids in Sīrat al-Amīra Dhāt al-Himma. The volume is comprised of eight articles, with a short introduction by Sabine Dorpmueller and two short prologues (the first of these, also by Dorpmueller, includes a bibliography of Remke Kruk's publications on Arabic popular epic).

The basic premise underlying this collection is that sīra literature “represents a way in which a large, but mainly inarticulate audience perceives, conceptualizes and commemorates history” (p. 3), and, on this basis, it sets out to explore the fictionalization of historical characters and events, the narrative structures shared by historiography and popular epic, and the impact of the socio-political context of the siyar on the representation of characters and events. Although a number of authors do address these issues (Peter Heath, Thomas Herzog, Faustina Doufikar-Aerts, Remke Kruk and Richard van Leeuwen), the volume encompasses a more diverse approach to historical characters in the inclusion of articles by Claudia Ott on the history of the compilation and construction of a specific manuscript, Giovanni Canova on Sayf b. Dhī Yazan as a historical figure in the works of Arab historiographers, and Khaled Abouel-Lail describing performative aspects of Sīrat Banī Ḥilāl in Upper and Lower Egypt. The papers themselves are a mix of full-length articles and shorter pieces (a couple of the papers are only around ten pages) and include contributions on the better-known siyar – Sīrat ʿAntar (Peter Heath), Baybars (Thomas Herzog), Dhāt al-Himma (Kruk), Banī Hilāl (Khaled Abouel-Lail) and Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan (Giovanni Canova) – as well as articles on the less well-known Sīrat al-Ḥākim bi-Amrillāh (Claudia Ott) and Sīrat al-Iskandar (Faustina Doufikar-Aerts), in addition to a paper by Richard van Leeuwen on the “epic romances” of Sīrat ʿUmar ibn Nuʿmān and ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb.

In common with the majority of sīra scholarship, and with the exception of Abouel-Lail's piece, all of the papers focus on the literary, rather than the oral, tradition of the siyar; especially in the case of Doufikar-Aaert's contribution on Sīrat Iskandar, which, as far as we know, existed only as a written tradition based in earlier texts (p. 98). A number of the articles share a concern with tracing individual episodes back to other written texts, specifically in terms of the relationship between sīra and historiographical sources. This reflects concerns of the field (which has, until recently, been interested in treating the siyar from a primarily historical standpoint) and leads to discussion of the ideas of fiction and popular history: Aerts describes Sīrat al-Iskandar as fiction whereas Herzog, Heath (and, in a more abstract sense, van Leeuwen) explore the idea of the siyar as popular history, as “truth” (albeit as a genre in which the truthfulness of their accounts of history are viewed with suspicion by elite culture).

The strength of the volume lies in this diversity in its coverage of ideas of historicity in a variety of siyar, and the light this casts on the degree of coherence with which these texts, as a genre, can be seen to expound a view of popular history – both in terms of the mechanics of the narrative techniques used and in the tropes through which these texts express their world view. Taken as a group, the discussion of fiction and history undertaken in these papers also ties clearly into wider issues, for example the continuing debate surrounding genre identity and categorization: thus Thomas Herzog categorizes Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan as “popular epic” alongside other siyar such as Sīrat Banī Ḥilāl and Sīrat ʿAntar, whereas Giovanni Canova follows previous scholarship in describing it as a “romance”; and Richard van Leeuwen describes ʿUmar ibn Nuʿmān and ʿAjīb wa-Gharīb, which have been incorporated as late additions within the framework of the Thousand and One Nights, as “epic romances”, raising the issue of the extent to which their inclusion in the Nights has changed their genre identity. There seems to be a correlation, for example, between Canova's identification of Sayf as romance and the fact that it is less based in reality: in his article he explicitly differentiates between this sīra and those which take Bedouin heroes as their protagonists. This seems partly to be premised on the fact that whereas Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan is set in legendary time, Sīrat Banī Hilāl and Sīrat ʿAntar are more obviously popular history.

Some of the pieces are very short and could have been expanded, and the coverage is quite disparate in its treatment of the core theme. These caveats aside, it is interesting to see the variety of methodological approaches in action, and the range of material covered provides interesting comparative insights. The serious dearth of English-language scholarship on the sīra makes this volume all the more welcome, even if, in an ideal world, it might have been more substantial.