This paper explores how identitarian concerns shape historiography by considering Indian Muslim responses to Jurji Zaydan’s history of Islam, focusing on the case of Shibli Nu‘mani (1857-1914), an Indian Muslim intellectual and religious reformer, who traveled across the Middle East in search of modernizing approaches to Islam. Through his travels he came to meet Jurji Zaydan (1861-1914), an Arab intellectual whom Shibli initially admired. However, after reading Zaydan’s History of Islamic Civilization, Shibli turned against him. In his scathingly polemical al-Intiqad ‘ala kitab al-tamaddun al-islami (“The Critique of the Book [History of] Islamic Civilization”), published in installments in the Egyptian magazine al-Manar in 1912, Shibli attacks Zaydan’s history. He accuses Zaydan, a Christian Arab, of hostility not only towards Islam, but towards Arabs in general. How can we make sense of this non-Arab Muslim’s critique of an Arab proto-nationalist like Zaydan as “anti-Arab”? How do religious and ethnic identities overlap in debates about historiography in the period? This attack cannot be attributed simply to Zaydan’s Christianity - Shibli’s estimation of European Christian Orientalists is remarkably different in his other works. In the prologue to his Shi‘r al-‘ajam (“Poetry of the Persians”), for example, Shibli admires Orientalists and argues that Islamic scholars can and should benefit from Orientalist scholarship. The problem, then, is not Zaydan’s non-Muslim vision of Islamic history per se, for Shibli was able to tolerate the similarly critical views of Orientalists from European Christian backgrounds. I argue that it is Zaydan’s very identity and subject position as an Arab Christian that poses the problem for Shibli. Shibli (like many of his Indian Muslim contemporaries) fetishizes Arabs as ideal Muslims, and therefore approaches Zaydan’s work in rigidly ethno-religious terms: he has a particular vision of what historiography, from an Arab perspective, should look like. Ironically, it is Shibli’s supposed esteem for the Arabs that leads him to dismiss an Arab modernizer and turn instead to the European Orientalists for models of modern approaches to historiography.