The Islamiyyat genre of literature, a type of neo-romantic retelling the lives of the Rashidun caliphs, has typically been studied within the confines of Egypt of the 1930s, with scholarship on the topic investigating on which side of a supposed Islamic/Secular binary the genre belongs. However, by taking the budding Islamiyaat of 1930s Egypt as a starting point rather than a self-contained system, and by expanding its geographic and temporal frame of reference to include other authors and countries, such as Mahmud Mas’adi of Tunisia, an author twenty-two years Husayn’s junior, the Islamiyyat project is significantly broadened in its scope and its aims. Indeed, a closer, comparative reading of Mas’adi’s Haddatha Abu Hurayra, Qaal and Taha Husayn’s ‘Ala Hamish Al-Sira reveals Husayn’s project as a point of departure for a larger project of Turath whose goals Mas’adi sought to emulate and whose limits he strove to test. Interestingly, the two texts engage the spatial in notably divergent ways. While Husayn’s prose resinscribes spatial categories already present in the Muslim reader’s horizon of expectations, thus reaffirming the reader’s sense of belonging to a geographically well-defined, historical entity, Mas’adi, arguably in response to Husayn, seeks to create a space narrated by the gaze of the Islamic subject, yet simultaneously outside the space of Islamic cultural memory. Thus, a comparative reading of the two literary texts, as well as an examination of the correspondence between Mas’adi and Husayn, reveals the reconfiguration of the sacred geographies of early Islam as a key component of Mas’adi’s challenge to the Islamiyyat genre and of his critique of Husayn -- a critique left tactfully ambiguous until after Husayn’s passing forty years after ‘Ala Hamish Al-Sira was first published.