Sīra shaʿbiyya is a genre in Islamic literature consisting of long heroic narrative.
In the manuscripts, most examples of the genre bear titles containing either the word sīra (biography) or qiṣṣa (novel).
The earliest surviving manuscripts of recorded sīras date to the fifteenth century.
Although essentially an Arabic genre, several sīras were translated into other languages of the Islamic world, such as Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Georgian, Urdu and Malay.
They "form a cohesive genre by reason of their shared emphasis on heroes and heroic deeds of battle, their pseudo-historical tone and setting, and their indefatigable drive towards cyclic expansion; one event leads to another, one battle to another, one war to another, and so on for hundreds and thousands of pages."