‘Izz al-Din al-Qassam Remembered? In a recent challenge put forth in the journal History Compass, historian Laila Parsons draws attention to the paucity of micro-narrative histories of the Middle East. Instead, academics in history and area studies departments in the post-Foucault, post-Said era have turned to critiquing histories of the Arab world by deconstructing their ability to narrate anything at all. This assertion that nationalism, colonialism and orientalism are discursive traps that seem to be inescapable has dampened the ability for contemporary historians to produce work with coherent narratives that capture any sort of discrete “past”. In this paper I will explore the textual life and death of Palestinian national icon ‘Izz ad-Din al-Qassam. Little is known of the man who has become revered by Palestinian nationalists of all political stripes: he was born in Syria, educated at al-Azhar, ministered in the rapidly growing slums of Mandate Haifa and was killed in a gun battle with British forces near the Palestinian town of Jenin. However, as Ted Swedenburg points out, the literature on Qassam usually imbues in his story an ideology (Islamist, Socialist, Pan-Arabist, Palestinian Nationalist etc.) that can be self-serving to the author and at times anachronistic. The sort of literary analysis done by Swedenburg is important in framing how Qassam gets politicized in the years since his death, but what is lacking is an analysis of the historiography of the Qassam narratives. In this paper I will address this historiographical gap by looking at a number of biographies of Qassam with particular attention to how they mine and interpret their sources. These secondary sources include biographies produced in English such as those by Bashir Nafi, and Abdallah Schleifer, as well as his Arabic biographies by Sami?h? H?ammu?dah, Baya?n Nuwayhid? al-H?u?t, and Abd al-Satta?r Qa?sim. In doing so I hope to map the contours of Qassam’s life by looking at how his life story has been narrated and where the narrative gets neatened and the historian’s “inventive faculty” shines through. My goal is to explore the points where these narratives come together and where they diverge, ultimately deconstructing the Qassam stories in a way that makes a particular appeal to a new style of writing history. One that acknowledges the many difficulties inherent in producing micro-narratives that are self-aware of the theoretical and methodological hurdles that Parsons describes.