Although Arab incursions into Armenia began c. 640, it wasn’t until the rise of the Marwanids that the province Arminiya, a catch-all toponym to designate the Arab conquests in the South Caucasus, came under the direct control of the caliphate. The position of Arminiya as a frontier against the Byzantines and the Khazars required that the land not only be conquered by Muslim armies and home to Muslim settlers, but that it should be relevant to the Islamic world in a more profound manner. We therefore find descriptions of mosques and Islamic shrines in Arminiya, as well as stories that link Arminiya to the Qur’anic narrative and Prophetic tradition. Geographers, exegetes, and historians of the Islamic world described Arminiya as significant to both caliphal history and the apocalyptic future of the Muslim community. The political and military frontier between Islam and Byzantium was thus reinforced by a conceptual border, one which delineated a distinct difference between Arm?niya and her Greek neighbors. This paper will examine the role of the sectarian milieu in the development of an Islamic identity for Arminiya by considering references to the province in Qur’anic exegesis. In short, the sacralization of the province required the internalization and domestication of relevant Christian beliefs, most especially those related to Alexander the Great, as isra’iliyyat. Legendary histories and Biblical exegesis familiar to Greek, Armenian, and Georgian Christian discourse surface in the Islamic setting in a new manner. The Islamic reconceptualization of “the North” and associated traditions are seen through the lens of Sasanian history, mitigated through Syriac and Persian literature rather than relying solely on Armenian or Greek sources. Arab and Persian authors also demonstrate familiarity with pre-Islamic Iranian cosmography, also possibly via Syriac intermediary sources, which they utilize to explicate Qur’anic passages. Both of these trends reveal the enduring relevance of Sasanian hegemony in the Caucasus and, by extension, Islamic claims to political legitimacy as heirs to the Persianate world. Although there are indications of early dialogue between Arabs and Armenians, Islamic narratives about Arminiya derived from polyvocal cross-cultural encounters in the Near East involving not merely Arabs and Armenians, but also Syrians and Persians.