This paper argues that an interdisciplinary method of approaching local histories from the Persianate world written in Arabic and Persian between the 10th and 15th centuries opens up new avenues for understanding how communities, rulers, and individuals framed issues of authority and identity in early Islamic Persia. How did authors balance their multiple identities as Persians, Muslims, and members of various regional, provincial, ethnic, sectarian, ideological, and professional communities? Patterns within city and regional histories from the peripheries of the Islamic empire – with its perceived heartlands in Arabia, Syria, and Iraq – identify local structures of authority and legitimacy. Histories produced in Anatolia, another notable periphery, provide a heuristic device to flesh out a comparative perspective. With this approach – freed from the reconstruction of events as the primary goal – intriguing dreams, fanciful genealogies, and suspect etymologies are transformed from data-poor curiosities into rich sources of information about identity, rhetoric, authority, legitimacy, and center-periphery relations. Authors positioned their communities to better fit into the scope of Islamic history. Consequently, local histories from Persia both respond to and challenge assumptions about the centrality of Arabs, Arabic, Arabia, Iraq, Syria, ṣaḥāba, tābiʿūn, ʿAlids, sayyids, and sharifs while at the same claiming their own centeredness and importance within these same frameworks. The Persian local histories from the 10th – early 15th centuries analyzed in this paper are Tārīkh-i Bukhārā, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, Tārīkh-i Qum, Tārīkh-Sīstān, and Tārīkh-i Tabaristān. The Anatolian sources considered as a heuristic counterpoint are al-Avāmir al-ʿalāʾiyya fī al-umūr al-ʿalāʾiyya, Musāmarat al-akhbār va musāyarat al-akhyār, Tārīkh-i Āl-i Saljūq dar Ānātūlī, Saljūqnāma, and Abū Muslim-nāmah. Authors of local histories from the Persianate world argued for the legitimacy and centrality of their communities on the peripheries of empire by including narratives about descendants of the Prophet associated with the region; incorporating narratives of legitimating dreams and visions; associating ṣaḥāba with the land; highlighting sites of pious visitation (ziyārat) and other sources of blessing or sacred power (baraka); and incorporating sacralizing etymologies. In contrast to the Persian texts, the Anatolian sources from the 13th – 14th centuries focus on the construction of dynastic and specifically Seljuq legitimacy and couch claims to legitimacy in terms of military success, genealogy, and the virtues of kingly rule. This paper concludes by arguing for the broader theoretical implications of a functionally skeptical reading of local history attuned to a metanarrative constructed by authors for audiences with hybrid Perso-Muslim identities.