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This article offers a reflection on the writing of the sīra , the "life of the Prophet," based on the study of the catalogs of the Egyptian National Library and the Library of al-Azhar. The cross-analysis of the classifications of medieval and modern sciences, and the categories used by cataloguers at the end of the 19th century and in the first half of the 20th century, shows that the sīra was irreducible to the "biography of the Prophet," and covered a much larger set of texts. The rest of the article offers a description of the corpus of 491 works of sīra and the 1,119 manuscripts and printed matter which are its material manifestations. We come to the conclusion that this corpus can be used to describe the culture of the sīra in Egypt and in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Two results appear particularly important: the constitution of series of texts (basic text, commentaries, glosses) makes it possible to describe a major part of the culture of commentary in the Ottoman period; the examination of the corpus also offers an interesting perspective on the transition between manuscript culture and printed culture in 19th century Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]