By the 1920’s, in the Egyptian public sphere, romantic aesthetic ideology advocated by the Diwan group and others had succeeded in overcoming classicist resistance and asserting a conception of literary writing that is humanist and liberatory while at the same time showing a distinctive national character. Such expression required universal, which is to say, European, literary forms. Nevertheless, the pre-romantic Arabic literary heritage, stigmatized as “oriental” within the world literary framework, could not be ignored or suppressed, and persisted as a primary site of contention in literary debates. Moreover, the strength of anti-colonial public discourse problematized identification with Western cultural models. This paper examines a significant trend that emerged in this context, the promotion of Eastern literature as a configuration of world literature opposed to the array of national literatures dominated by Europe. Egypt’s leading proponent of Eastern literature in this period was ‘Abd al-Wahhab ‘Azzam (1894-1959), who after earning a doctorate at SOAS was the first professor of Eastern languages at Cairo University, and went on to become a prominent Egyptian diplomat. His extensive publications include translations of many of the major Persian works of the Indian poet and philosopher Muhammad Iqbal (1877-1938). This connection is of significance, in that Iqbal sought to create, by way of his Persian poetry, an Eastern Islamic literature of romantic and humanist character as a counterpart to Western literature while devaluing territorial nationalities. For this reason, Iqbal played a major role in ‘Azzam’s similar advocacy. The journal al-Risala established from its first issue in January 1933 a column entitled “On Eastern Literature” authored primarily by ‘Azzam. He inaugurated the column with translations from Iqbal’s work “The Message of the East,” composed as a response to Goethe’s “West-East Divan.” This paper focuses on the concept of Eastern literature and ‘Azzam’s advocacy of it in the 1930’s in Egypt. The paradoxical category of Eastern literature, which adopts orientalist premises as well as romantic literary norms, could not become the basis of an alternative world literary framework. It constitutes, however, a way in which the supposed “easternness” of the Arabic literary heritage was reconceptualized, with the aid of transnational linkages, as a means of inhabiting world literature alongside European literatures but at the same time in opposition to the West.