Arab history and the genesis of Arab historical consciousness are traditionally believed to emanate from memories of Arabian tribal battles fought during the two centuries before Islam. These wars, the ‘Arab Battle Days’ (ayyām al-ʿarab), are both the most detailed corpus of stories constituting the lore of Arab pre-history, and the reference points for the chronology of pre-Islamic Arabia itself. Muslim historians did not articulate a ‘before hijra’ dating-system, and Arabian history accordingly unfolds via the memorialisation of a sequence of violent days winding backwards through the era of pre-Islam, labelled by Muslim writers as al-Jāhiliyya (the ‘Age of Passion’). The ayyām’s significance in Muslim accounts of Arab history contrasts the silence in documentary evidence and contemporary non-Arabic pre-Islamic writings where details of the battles are scarcely perceptible. We are accordingly left with a large body of Muslim-era texts to understand the pre-Islamic al-ayyām today, and given this situation, the interpretation of al-ayyām calls particularly for the methods of narratological historiography. Analysis sensitive to literary devices, prosimetrum and narrative techniques is key for modern scholarship to read the Arabic poetry and prose tales which grew around the edifice of Arab pre-history. Leaving aside searches for ‘kernels of truth’, instead we can ask why Muslim writers were so interested in the battle stories and for what purposes they narrated the lore. This presentation will discuss initial findings related to the narratives of al-ayyām in Arabic literature – part of a major research project I am undertaking about the Muslim reconstructions of al-Jāhiliyya. Focusing on the fourth/tenth century al-Iṣfahānī’s Kitāb al-Aghānī, I seek to understand how pre-Islamic Arabian battles are narrated, and, by marshalling literary methods informed by Bakhtinian theories of chronotope and epic, I will reveal how al-Iṣfahānī (akin to similar litterateurs of his era) crafted al-Jāhiliyya history through the building blocks of space (the desert) and time (Arabian battle days), and thereby transformed scattered verses into a corporeal world through which their audiences could conceptualise Islam’s formative milieu. This approach hopes to reveal how works assumed to be ‘literary’ structurally and crucially interact with ‘history’, and reconnoitres new methodologies which we can employ to grasp Muslim senses of their pre-Islamic past.