In 1941, the Lebanese composer and musicologist Wadia Sabra published an article with the provocative title, “Arab music is the basis for Western art,” in which he argued that, contrary to popular belief, it was Arab music and not Greek music that had primarily influenced contemporary European classical music and had given it much of its core technique and theory. Among his arguments, Sabra claimed that the Arabs had invented the harmonic interval of a third, which is crucial to all Western art music, directly contradicting the Orientalist belief that Arab music not only lacked harmony but was indeed defined by this lack. Thus Sabra’s work inverted colonialist understandings of music and history by positioning Arab and Muslim cultures in the role of historical leaders, while also subversively invoking the modernity marker of what he called “musical science” to do it. This project developed out of the longer trajectory of Sabra’s career, in which he studied musicology in Paris and was hailed as a musical “polyglot” by his French interlocutors, going on to represent Lebanon at the 1932 Cairo Congress of Arab Music where he worked on the commission to modernize Arab scales. This paper will analyze Sabra’s career, focusing on two pivotal texts: “Arab Music is the basis for Western art” (1941) and “Exposé of a Perfected New System” (1940), the latter of which came out of his work at the Congress and sought to develop a universal musical system that brought together Eastern and Western scales through scientific methods. I ask: how can we reconcile Sabra’s attempt to make a “universal music” with his claims for Arab musical superiority? How did Sabra’s invocations of scientific language represent a rhetorical move towards a musical modernity, and how can this be situated against this period of European colonialism, Arab nationalism, and Sabra’s unique mobility as a scholarly figure? In what ways did Sabra’s work undermine or challenge colonialist and Orientalist narratives, and in what ways did it continue to underwrite their basic premises? In this paper I will show that this fascinating and understudied figure offers an understanding of the complex intersections of knowledge, culture, Orientalism, and pan-Arabism, and more broadly that by approaching music as both lens and historical object, we can gain deeper insight into the intellectual processes and political claims-making of this period.