The narratives surrounding the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah in the Islamic annals present an excellent case study for examining the rôle of narrative in fashioning early Islamic historiography. By reading between the lines, I contend in my paper that we can uncover complex and fully-developed characters that challenge the stereotypical depictions of early Muslim heroes. In addition, more than simple history or even didactic lessons, I argue that the texts represent literary texts that must be examined in terms of general mythical archetypes. The commander of the Arab-Muslim army at al-Qādisiyyah was Saʿd b. Abī Waqqāṣ, one of Muḥammad’s closest Companions and one of the ‘ten promised paradise’. Yet, in a curious and wholly extraordinary situation, Saʿd never set foot on the battle-field, allegedly due to a humiliating and debilitating illness. Instead, the historical sources focus their attentions on a minor poet-warrior named Abū Miḥjan, whose awe-inspiring acts of bravery in combat restored the confidence of his fellow fighters. Nevertheless, Abū Miḥjan himself was a controversial figure—a drunkard and a coward who pursued a debaucherous life of bacchanalia and chasing women. The utterly unorthodox nature of these two individuals—discerned through a close and careful reading of the texts—stands in stark contrast to their ‘official’ biographies and the efforts by later historians to whitewash the past. Indeed, what emerges is a rare opportunity for the modern historian to observe remarkably-human portraits of these early Muslims. Furthermore, a broader look at the narrative can identify these and other figures in the historical annals according to mythical archetypes—here, Saʿd is the Hero and Abū Miḥjan is the Trickster. Ultimately, I suggest that the texts represent a partially-developed prose epic, which failed to coalesce into a proper epic due to the very literate nature of early Islamic civilisation. While the emphasis on written Arabic accounts may have forestalled the emergence of an Arab-Islamic epic, the half-historical and half-literary nature of the sources tells us much about the processes of creating and constructing narratives in the first centuries of Islamic society and the identity and self-conception of those fashioning its formative texts.