The paper discusses Asad Rustum and Constantine Zurayq’s work on the history of historiography, investigating its centrality to their pedagogical endeavours. It argues that in their writing and teaching, Rustum and Zurayq placed Arab and Islamic historiography in the middle of a civilizational sequence between the Greco-Roman tradition of history writing and that of Enlightenment Europe. Historiography, therefore, served as the vessel for bringing the Arab world into a narrative of global civilizational progress. And pedagogy, for Rustum and Zurayq, served as a tool for cementing this narrative into a collective consciousness. The paper begins with a history of historiography in its Arab/Arabic iteration, investigating when and how historiography was first taken up as a core component of students’ training in history at the Syrian University (SU) and the American University of Beirut (AUB) from the 1930s and until the late 1950s. It then discusses the professionalization of the historical discipline in the practice of Rustum who drew on methods of ’isn?d developed for the verification of ?ad?th, and analogized this Arabo-Islamic methodology to modern, ‘scientific’ European historiographical practices. The paper moves on to discuss how Zurayq embraced Rustum’s claims of a purportedly scientific Arabic historiography in order to narrate the key Arab role in civilization’s march towards modernity. Zurayq therefore establishes a genealogical lineage to his modern project of Arab nationalism. Pedagogy serves as both the vehicle, but also the incubator in which this project came to be developed and cemented into the collective consciousness of the educated elite. In examining how ideas are transformed and operationalized in curricula, I hope to expand the site and archive of intellectual history beyond published works and into pedagogical and administrative archives. Specifically, the paper draws on lecture notes, textbooks and other course material on the history of historiography at SU and AUB. I will read those sources in tandem with two monographs on the same topic: Rustum’s Mustalah al-Tarikh (1939) and Zurayq’s Nahnu wal-Tarikh (1959). Reading educational archives alongside published works reveals how ideas flow and develop across the classroom and the monograph.