How did pre-modern Islamic societies develop over time? Historians have been searching for answers to this complex question in massive Arabic chronicles and biographical collections that survive by the dozens. Advances in digital humanities offer an approach that can overcome all usual methodological limitations associated with the study of these massive historical texts and open virtually unlimited research opportunities. This paper will present the main conceptual and methodological aspects of the implementation of a specific and new DH approach. Medieval historians composed their texts by picking and choosing “passages” from their sources, rephrasing them, commenting on them, and, in the end, reassembling them into their own representations of historical reality. In a somewhat similar manner, we can computationally disassemble all surviving sources into such passages. (Due to the use of unique identifiers with all passages we will still be able to reassemble original texts as well as to keep adding other historical texts as they become available.) Using metadata from the original books and such methods as named-entity recognition, we can arrange these passages chronologically and geographically, merging them into what will virtually become the “master chronicle” of Islamic history. Using computational methods for identifying textual similarities, we can then assemble these passages into networks of related historical information. This arrangement will allow for a variety of modes of reading. For example, one will be able to read: “historically”—by moving from one event to another in chronological order; “historiographically”—by exploring how specific events were presented by different Arab historians; “thematically”—by focusing only on events that deal with specific topics. Moving between distant and close reading will be effortless as trends can be graphed and mapped, and any specific passage, which constitutes a given trend, can be read carefully in a traditional manner. By bringing together all available historical texts, the master chronicle will provide the most thorough possible coverage of historical periods and geographical regions. By marshaling all available quantitative evidence, the master chronicle will make the qualitative analysis more substantial as findings will rest on exhaustive textual evidence. The master chronicle will allow us to conduct research in a “cumulative” manner where results are attained at a large scale and with reproducible means, providing a solid foundation for asking novel research questions. Finally, the master chronicle will serve as a robust exploratory environment for studying any research question that can be possibly approached through Arabic historical texts.