In this paper I examine presentations of Companions and Successors to the Companions of the Prophet (sahaba and t?abi’?un) in pre-Mongol Iranian urban histories. I argue that these urban histories were avenues through which Muslims in early Islamic Iran between the 9th and 12th centuries expressed identity, legitimacy, and piety. Pre-Mongol Iranian urban histories demonstrate a pattern not seen elsewhere: there is tremendous attention paid to Companions and Successors as defining characteristics of the virtues (fada’il) of a city. These texts employ Companions and Successors as foundational members of the city in order to bind the city to the Prophet and prophetic authority. Companions and Successors are also notable as hadith transmitters in these cities, and they therefore elucidate the state of what would become non-canonical hadith, its importance, and its variety in early Muslim Iran. My research employs a new methodological approach to hadith study and research of the Companions and Successors. Functionally, I adopt a skeptical methodology. However, both my assumptions and my conclusions differ greatly from those of the skeptics in the fields of hadith study and Islamic historiography. Most of my sources are pre-Mongol city histories written in Iran. These are generally bilingual Persian-Arabic texts, and they include: Tarikh-i Bayhaq, Tarikh-i Sistan, Tarikh-i Qum, Fada’il-i Balkh, Tarikh-i Tabaristan, Tarikh-i Ruyan, Rawzat al-Jannat fi Awsaf-i Madinat Herat, Tarikh Gurgan, Kitab dhikr akhbar Isbahan and the Gurgan-name. Futuh Misr by Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam (d. 257/870) is one very notable exception to the general pattern that Iranian local histories are more focused on the Companions and Successors as virtues of the city than histories written elsewhere, such as in Sham, Yemen, Arabia, or Oman. Futuh al-Andalus by the same author is another counter-example. I will examine why this quality, evident in Iran generally and in Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam’s work, is absent elsewhere. I conclude that in their portrayal of the Companions’ and Successors’ ties to the city, these local Iran histories sought legitimation for their city through claimed connections to the Prophet. The varied representations of the Companions and Successors also highlights the diversity of Iranian-Muslim urban identity in the medieval period. These regionally differentiated understandings of Islam and expressions of Islamic piety and self-identity were precisely what canonizers of the early hadith collections found they needed to supersede in order to create a universally acceptable corpus of canonical hadith.