Islam’s increased presence in public consciousness stirs desire to better understand the religion and its history, but prevailing opinions of Muslims and non-Muslims, popular and scholarly alike, are currently clouded because a key web of issues remains almost entirely overlooked. The problem concerns Islam and its pre-history. Theorists stress the important functions of origin myths for developing communities and constructing identities, yet Middle East Studies lacks critical scrutiny of Muslim narratives of pre-Islam. Consequently, much current opinion skips over the vast corpus of early Muslim-era Arabic literature about pre-Islam in favour of generalising presumptions that Muslims essentially deride memories of pre-Islamic times as reprobate, pagan ‘anti-Islam’. Such views crucially misunderstand the plurality of ways earlier generations of Muslims negotiated their pre-history, and instead erect binary and essentialising distinctions that divide history into pre-Islamic and Muslim-era ‘silos’, and nudge some Muslims towards radical impressions that a purification from all ‘non-Islamic’ elements is necessary. There is pressing need to redress opinion by re-assessing pre-modern Muslim thinking about pre-Islam: by applying innovative methods to critically interpret a wide corpus of early Arabic sources, EPIC PASTS will refocus current views to see pre-Islam through Muslim eyes. During the dynamic ninth and tenth centuries when Muslim literary culture first flowered, Iraqi writers crafted formative and enduringly influential traditions about pre-Islam, but most modern historians just trawl these narratives for empirical data without source-critical apparatus. Pre-Islamic lore was primarily related through literature, but it is seldom analysed via narratological methodologies, nor are memory studies applied to probe the corpus’ compilation. Medieval Iraqis have much to tell the contemporary world about Islamic views on origins and identity, but their messages go unnoticed, and herein EPIC PASTS’ critical methodologies will identify the diachronic evolution of pre-Islam’s memorialisation and its precise functions in shaping Muslim community, identity and thought.