The first century of Islamic history is (in)famous for the formidable challenges posed by the paucity of incontestably reliable source material to have survived into the modern era. In order to unearth and reconstruct, say, the imperial ideologies and governing practices of various Umayyad dynasts, resourceful and intrepid historians of this period have mined source material as diverse as the epistles of caliphs and their scribes, courtly or tribal panegyric and invective, papyri and inscriptions, and numismatic and material evidence. A hitherto undervalued source for retrieving such ideologies, I argue, is also one of the most familiar to historians of early Islam: the maghazi accounts putatively narrating events from the life of the Prophet Muhammad. Within recent decades, new methods for dating and tracing the literary evolution of hadith and sira-maghazi materials have considerably expanded our ability to reliable date a select body of these materials to the Umayyad period or, more precisely, the early 8th century C.E. (cf. the work of Juynboll, Motzki, Schoeler, et al.). However, such scholarship has predominately focused on dating and/or authenticating the transmission of said materials rather than situating them in the Sitz am Leben that accounts for their existence in the first place. Taking a selection of materials attributed to the most influential pioneer of the maghazi genre, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (d.742), this paper interrogates accounts of al-Zuhri--as transmitted by one of his most prominent pupils, Ma‘mar ibn Rashid, and preserved in the Musannaf of ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-San‘ani--as potential sources for early Islamic imperial ideology. In doing so, I seek to answer the following questions: 1) do Zuhri’s maghazi traditions exhibit any trace of the Umayyad courtly patronage which he famously received, 2) can the origins and articulation of these accounts be best situated in a Syrian or Medinan geographic milieu, and 3) do any of Zuhri’s maghazi traditions proffer insights into Umayyad caliphal ideology and/or propaganda?