Many protagonists of early popular siras (those first attested in the 12th century) are black, but it is less often the case that they are ethnically African: of the three major black champions in this corpus of chivalric texts, two (Abu Zayd al-Hilali of Sirat Bani Hilal and ‘Abd al-Wahhab of Sirat Dhat al-Himma) are born non-hereditarily black to Arab families under variant circumstances—Abu Zayd’s mother petitions God for a child with the ferocity of a crow, even if he should share its blackness, which he in turn does; ‘Abd al-Wahhab’s conception during his mother’s menses results in his fetal tissue being tinctured dark brown. Nonetheless, ‘Abd al-Wahhab marshals a large army of Africans and helms the battalions at the Byzantine frontier with such authority that one soldier takes him for the “caliph of the blacks.” We may thus query what it means that the anchoring figure of the black community as presented within the sira is stripped biologically and culturally of any form of Africanness. The text of Sirat Dhat al-Himma is particularly instructive in addressing the question of why, in Arabic popular works such as the 1001 Nights and folkloric hikayat, we so often encounter “blacks,” but so rarely encounter them as ethnically, tribally, geographically variegated Africans. I posit that in the case of the siras, there is an assimilationist import to the “thinning” of descriptions of diasporic African figures in the Muslim world. The proposed paper presents a vignette in Sirat Dhat al-Himma in which a coveted black warrior—Abu al-Hazahiz—is “flipped” from the Muslim to the Byzantine side, leaving ‘Abd al-Wahhab tasked with crossing the frontier and returning him to the fold of Islam. This peripatetic scene facilitates a discussion of several themes undergirding the representation of black identity and its tensions in the s?ra, including the text’s didactic prioritization of religious rather than ethno-racial distinctions (indicated by the genealogical notion of hasab wa-nasab) as the seat of prestige, its correspondent fraught expurgation of African characters’ indigenous identities through onomastics and other techniques of characterization, and the countervailing discursive natures of the racially organized Muslim military and the transcendental Muslim umma. I relate these themes both intra-textually and outward, considering both the treatment of converted Byzantines vis-à-vis their African peers in the s?ra itself as well as broader discourses in medieval Arabic popular, theological, and historical literature on race and integration into an expanding Islamic polity.