The era of the Fatimids (909-1171) and the Buyids (945-1055) is often known in scholarship as the “Shi’i Century.” During this period, these two Shi’i states rose to power in North Africa, Iraq, and Iran, challenging the power of the Sunni ‘Abbasid caliphate. Thus, this period is often remembered in medieval primary sources and modern secondary sources as a time of extreme sectarian conflict, when new Shi’i movements were challenging the authority of the Sunni ‘Abbasid hegemony over Islam. This paper, however, challenges the notion that the ‘Shi’i century’ gave birth to an era of sectarian conflict in Islam. Instead, it argues that there was no unified tenth-century Sunni response to the rise of these two Shiʿi dynasties. This paper accomplishes this task by examining contemporary – tenth century – Sunni responses to the rise of the Fatimids and the Buyids, and then contrasting them with portrayals of this period dating to the eleventh century and later. The post tenth-century Sunni sources depict the Fatimid and Buyid era as one of sectarian conflict. The tenth-century Sunni sources, however, written by Muslim travelers, Sunni religious scholars, and Sunni religious officials living under Fatimid and Buyid rule, are not predominately concerned with the Shiʿi identity of these two Shiʿi states. These tenth-century Sunni sources focus instead on conflict between the different Sunni schools of jurisprudence and on the disintegration of 'Abbasid power. Tenth-century sources paint a much different picture of sectarian conflict than eleventh to fifteenth-century historical chronicles, which cast the tenth century as a sectarian narrative. These tenth-century sources, such as Al-Muqaddasi’s Ahsan al-Taqasim fi Ma'arifat Al-Aqalim, Al-Khushani’s Kitab tabaqat ʿulama’ Ifriqiya, Al-Tanukhi’s al-Mudawwanah al-Kubra, Al-Qayrawani’s Kitab al-Jamiʿ and ‘Arib b. Saʿd al-Qurtubi’s Silat ta’rikh al-Tabari, reveal the ways that local non-Shi’i Muslims reacted to the advent of Shi’i rule in North Africa and Iraq. Thus, this paper will demonstrate the diversity and fluidity of medieval Islamic identity and challenges the notion of rigid sectarian conflict in the medieval Islamic world.