This paper analyzes how the split timescapes of Arabic popular epics, or sīras, project an uncanny vision of the pre-Islamic past in order to displace the present and envision the future. The sīras are commonly understood to have two primary temporal layers: the context of narration, framed in text through refrains such as qāla al-rāwī (“the narrator said…”), and the setting of the tale itself. Several sīras, including tales of ‘Antara ibn Shaddād, Yemen’s Tubba‘ dynasty, and Hamza ibn ‘Abd al-Muttalib, moreover, have been described in secondary scholarship as rendering these figures “proto-Muslim'' in what is often presumed to be an editorial concession to contemporary sensibilities. Heroes evince pious attitudes even prior to the birth of the Prophet Muhammad, though not under the label of hanīfiyya as found in traditionist sources. It is notable, then, that these heroes often contend not only against the constellation of moral ills implied by jāhiliyya–polytheism, sexual vice, corruption of authority, consumption of intoxicants–but also against ills that have endured into the narrator’s present, particularly the paradox of Islam’s universal promises being distributed unevenly along lines determined not by faith, but by birth and circumstance. What critical work might this dual projection of both godfearingness and its worldly hindrances onto a maligned past do? I answer this question by thinking in reverse, reading jāhilī heroes not as preternaturally enacting Islam’s morals and precepts in pre-Islamic times, but as confronting the ongoing societal dilemmas of the audience’s Islamic context as if they are long past. Following the epics themselves, I focus particularly on dilemmas of hierarchy and exclusion along lines of class, gender, and racialized kind. In view of Mikhail Bakhtin’s characterization of space and time as co-constituted through genre, as well as Charles W. Mills’ articulation of the “chronopolitical” power that actors claim and exercise in narrativizing what time means for whom, I argue that a series of popular epics fashion a “jāhilī chronotope.” In so doing, the texts present a moralized portrait of time as at once progressive and cyclic, with successive generations of heroes necessary to continuously mobilize the gains made by their forebears towards further piety, expansion, and cohesion within the Muslim community. Reading these texts’ approaches to time as inventive and directed rather than blandly conciliatory, I demonstrate that ‘Abbasid- and Mamluk-era folk cultures participated in these eras’ broader discourses of temporality, advancement, and aspiration.