From 1938 to 1947, a Chinese Muslim scholar named Muhammad Tawāḍuʿ Pang—known in China as Pang Shiqian—lived and studied at al-Azhar as part of a set of interwar Chinese Muslim missions to Egypt. While in Cairo, Tawāḍuʿ Pang produced his Arabic-language magnum opus, China and Islam, published by the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Islamic World Outreach Division” in May 1945. This book was perhaps the most remarkable work in a bilingual corpus of Islamic thought produced by the prolific “Chinese Azharites.” My essay maps Tawāḍuʿ Pang’s understanding and application of Islamic reformist concepts—part of a larger Chinese Muslim attempt to stake their claim within the broader Islamic world and simultaneously to make China and the world safe for Islam. At a time of acute geopolitical and existential crisis brought by the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, China’s war with Japan, and the rapid rise of secular ideologies and institutions in both Asia and the Middle East, the Egypt missions provided an opportunity to “re-Orient” Chinese Islam on a more auspicious path. I argue that during this period, Islamic reformist thought articulated in the Arab Middle East formed the crucial center of gravity on which Chinese Muslims pinned their hopes for greater self-understanding and sound sociopolitical progress. Utilizing little-known Arabic and Chinese sources and building on diverse fields including Chinese, Middle Eastern, Islamic, and global history, this essay seeks to decouple Chinese Muslim history from prior narratives of marginalization, and to decouple histories of China and the Middle East from teleologies of modernization and the fraught encounter between “West” and “non-West.” In reading and contextualizing this critical portion of the Chinese Azharite corpus, this essay also reconstructs a brief moment of possibility in which transnationalist forms of allegiance held equal if not greater sway to nationalist ones in Chinese Muslim consciousness, and in which the pursuit of modernization and progress need not entail a rejection of faith or the abandonment of a much-celebrated past.