This paper explores the emergence of new iterations of Islamic universalism in the mid 20th century. To that end, I look at the affinities between two important 1960s texts that are rarely if ever discussed in the same context: The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley, and a travelogue entitled Khasi Dar Miqhat (generally translated as Lost in the Crowd) by preeminent Iranian intellectual Jalal al-e Ahmad. Malcolm X’s famous autobiography was published in 1965, just a few months after Al-e Ahmad had returned to Iran from the hajj trip that comprises the story narrated in 1966’s Khasi Dar Mighat. Similarly, The Autobiography of Malcolm X culminates in its author embarking on his own hajj, a journey that profoundly altered Malcolm’s ever-evolving political and philosophical worldview. Certainly, the hajj narrative is not merely a 20th century phenomenon. These particular hajj texts signal a new political and ethical imaginary of the anti-colonial era. Malcolm X and Jalal Al-e Ahmad were both political thinkers whose lives were marked by restless intellectual and political exploration. Though both men adopted politics that would later be become classified as “Islamist” in content, they are each more generally read from within the provincial national concerns found in American and Iranian studies respectively. It is my contention that Malcolm’s and Al-e Ahmad’s hajj writings represent an emergent 20th century imaginary of Islamicized universalism that was conceived of as an ethical alternative to the rigid nationalisms and leftist internationalisms that were then in vogue among engagé intellectuals. Whereas Malcolm’s sudden death in 1965 is often interpreted as the tragic cutting short of his newfound ethical engagements, Al-e Ahmad’s abrupt death in 1969 is seen as minor footnote in the locomotive momentum of the “Islamic Ideology” of the Islamic Republic he is said to have helped found with his writing. Against this historiographical tradition, I ask whether it is possible to read the ethical horizons imagined by these political theorists without collapsing them into common tropes of “black nationalism” (for Malcolm) and linear pre-cursors to the 1979 Iranian revolution (Al-e Ahmad). What kinds of readings of these texts emerge when we take them out of their nationalized homes? What are the implications of the universalist ethics that these texts imagine?