Most histories of Middle East-South Asian interaction are histories of Muslims and Islam, the hajj and the ‘ulema, translational piety and dutiful exegesis across the umma. Some scholars have moved beyond the focus on Islam and Muslims by comparing the creation of Israel with that of Pakistan and India or the experience of India’s Muslims and Europe’s Jews. In these new accounts, race and the violence of settlement are elided and the European experience of modernity is taken as paradigmatic. Meanwhile, other work which pays attention to the global and imperial dynamics of Islamicate interactions aims to historicize the emergence of the “Muslim world” or trace something called “Muslim cosmopolitanism” between the Middle East and South Asia, but often jump from South Asia to Asia Minor, largely ignoring what is in between. The archives of intellectuals from Cairo, Beirut and Baghdad, especially those of Jews and Christians, are left largely untouched. This paper engages this new historiography by considering a not so surprising convergence of colonial time which took place in the Asia that stretched from the Mediterranean to the Bay of Bengal in the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. In 1857, a revolt in the subcontinent ushered in a new mode British administration; in 1860, the end of a civil war in Mount Lebanon indelibly changed the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its subjects. Minoritization would begin with a fury. For intellectuals in both places—Arab Christians and Indian Muslims in particular—these dates would come occupy their political imaginations. In 1947 and 1948, the same people who reckoned with those earlier events, faced what Edward Said once called “the parting gift of Empire.” In histories of the nation, these dates and the period between them took on a profound significance, thinking globally about 1857/60–1947/48 challenges these nationalist narrarations. I do this by comparing the work of—and following the connections between— two prominent Arab Christian and Indian Muslim intellectuals, Jurji Zaidan (1861-1914) and Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958). Both founded journals entitled al-Hilal, “The Crescent,” one in Cairo and the other in Calcutta.