While Arabic had been an object of study by Indian Muslims for centuries, British colonial rule in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India opened up new possibilities for Islamic philology. Indian Muslim scholars like Chiragh ʿAli (1844-1895), Hamiduddin Farahi (1863-1930), ʿAbd al-Quddus Hashimi Nadvi (b. 1911), and others acquired knowledge of Hebrew from British Orientalists. In the same time period, Ahmadi Muslim missionaries from India visited the Levant, proselytizing in Syria and Palestine. One such missionary, Sayyid Zayn al-ʿAbidin Waliullah Shah (1889-1967), went on to teach Urdu at Salahuddin Ayyubiyya College in Jerusalem. Drawing on Arabic and Urdu-language sources such as diaries, travelogues, and religious polemics, as well as British archival material in English, this paper explores these little-known cases of language learning among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Muslims. What were the motivations for Muslims in this time period to learn languages (like Hebrew in India or Urdu in Palestine) that had not historically been part of Islamic philology? How did they make sense of linguistic difference? How did colonial power—which enabled both the study of Hebrew in India and the mobility of Indian Muslims to Mandatory Palestine—impact Muslim practices of philology? While European Orientalist study of languages has been the subject of a great deal of scholarly inquiry, modern Muslim study of non-European languages remains a neglected question. This paper argues that such Muslim philological practices may complicate existing narratives of Orientalism and study of the ‘Other.’ The case studies also span lands conventionally thought of as belonging to separate regions—the Middle East and South Asia—thus challenging the traditional Area Studies paradigm.