This paper examines the relatively few but important Arabic-language writings of leading Uyghur/Turkistani and Chinese Muslim intellectuals from the late 1920s to the late 1940s, as well as the reception of and politics surrounding those writings in the Arab world, especially but not exclusively in Cairo. On its various sides, major events shaping this period included the convening of the Caliphate congresses, the rise of new Arab readerships, the consolidation of power by the nationalist Guomindang (GMD/KMT) government in China, the emergence of national Muslim organizations in China interested in greater contact with the Middle East, the dispatching of Chinese Muslim scholars to study at al-Azhar in Cairo, and the establishment of the First and Second East Turkistan Republics (1933-34, 1944-46) in defiance of Chinese territorial claims. Within this complex environment, the debate over the “Eastern” versus “Western” orientation of Egyptian and Arab identity intersected in consequential ways with the question of Muslims’ status in modern China. Uyghurs and Chinese Muslims competed over major representatives of Arab Muslim opinion, among them the sheikhs of al-Azhar; activists and publishers such as Rashid Rida, Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, and Hajj Amin al-Husayni; and the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. While Uyghur nationalists such as Sabit Damollah appealed to the same broad Islamic solidarity that had fueled the Caliphate congresses, the Chinese Muslims at al-Azhar ultimately made a more concerted bid for Arab hearts and minds. Chinese Azhar scholars such as Muhammad Pang Shiqian, Muhammad Ma Jian, and Badr al-Din Hai Weiliang authored articles and books in Arabic acknowledging Xinjiang’s cultural connections to the Islamic world without contesting its political status as part of China. Intellectually, they achieved this by adopting a racialized discourse of “civilization,” originating in European Orientalism, to draw a world-historical analogy between “China” and “the Arabs.” This act of conceptual commensuration was simultaneously one of exclusion, allowing both Uyghurs and Chinese Muslims to be portrayed as the long-standing cultural “bridge” between the two civilizations, while quietly dismissing the relevance of those histories to modern political identity. During the Second World War, Chinese Muslim diplomats followed these efforts by appealing directly to Arab heads of state and Uyghurs abroad in favor of Chinese nationalist claims. In short, Chinese Muslims in the interwar and wartime Arab world served as counter-informants who undermined the intellectual bases of Uyghur nationalism and set the stage for the world’s longer-term failure to recognize Xinjiang as a colonized space.