As products of a borderland between Africa and the Middle East, the writings of Ethiopian Christian scholars occasionally offer a unique view of the world beyond the Red Sea. This paper introduces and analyzes the constructions of the Muslim world evident in several Ge’ez and Amharic histories from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There are two principal sources for this discussion. The first is series of royal biographies, or yaheywet tarik, that describe the sixteenth century military conflicts between Ethiopian Christians, the Adal Sultanate, and its Ottoman allies. The second source is a seventeenth century universal history, or yalam tarik, that briefly describes the emergence of Islam and its impact on world history over the long term. This second source, contained in the Zuryas Warq manuscript at the Institute of Ethiopian Studies, has yet to be translated or receive scholarly attention. After introducing and outlining the main themes and concerns of these historical works, this paper will use them to explore their authors’ intellectual constructions of the Muslim world. Key questions will include the following: What motivated Ethiopian scholars to write about distant parts of the world? How did they acquire their knowledge of foreign lands, and to what extent were their works informed by other scholarly traditions? And how did they conceptualize their relations with their Muslim, Christian, and Jewish neighbors? The paper concludes by considering these works in light of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s arguments about a global sixteenth century turn towards innovative forms of world historiography. This paper contends that while the topical interests of these Ethiopian works resemble the new historical scholarship Subrahmanyam describes, their underlying source material and analytic categories are rooted in a much older tradition of universal historiography in which the distant is always subordinate to the local.