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One of the paradigmatic chronological demarcations in Middle and Near Eastern studies has been the notorious notion of a “pre-Islamic” vs. an “Islamic” divide in this history. For some in the field, the cue has come from the Arab conquests of the region in the seventh century, a series of conquests which have been, regularly and fallaciously, also identified as “Islamic Conquests.” For others, and even more problematically, the watershed has been based on the date of the Hijra, or Prophet Muhammad’s Immigration from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE – a single event in Islamic narratives of origin.