Sirat Sayf ibn Dhi-Yazan

Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan (Arabic: سيرة سيف بن ذي يزن‎‎) "the Biography of Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan", is a popular Arab romance dating according to experts to somewhere between the 15th and 16th century CE. This romance is a mixture of epic and pure fantasy, and is inspired ultimately by the life of its eponymous hero Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan.

Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan was a king of Yemen who reigned in the 6th century CE. He owes his fame to the fact that he belonged to the rich Yaz'anite Dynasty which ruled the Ḥimyarite Kingdom, and for his struggle against the Aksumite invasions from Ethiopia. It is well known that he called on the Persian Sassanid Empire to come to his help in 570.12.

His exploits made him the perfect literary hero for a literature produced in reaction to the Christian Crusades in the Middle Ages, which sought to portray the triumph of Islam especially against the Aksumites who after threatening Yemen in the 6th century, seriously slowed down the expansion of the Muslims in Abyssinia. Moreover, the principal enemy of the hero is none other than Sayfa Ar’ed, the Ethiopian king from 1344 to 1372 and one of the leading men of the Negus in the war against the Muslim princes in the 14th and 15th centuries. The reference to this king is one of the rare elements that allow us to date the ‘biography’ as a late work. The world it deals with is therefore directly inspired by problems that were contemporary with the period when it was written.

What makes it original however is the combination of these questions at the time it was composed and a very special atmosphere in which magic and myths predominate.

There are five sīrats that form a literary corpus of popular epics, often authoritative, belonging properly to the Arabo-Persian world, and to this corpus belongs the Sīrat Sayf ibn Dhī Yazan. The best known of these though, and the most studied is the Romance of Baybars, the first volumes of which the French publishers Éditions Acte Sud is planning to publish. Apart from that, Jean-Claude Garcin has gathered a collective of researchers to produce articles on this work in Lecture du roman de Baybars, which permits an historical approach to this type of source.

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