This article explores the Nahdawi enthusiasm for the Chinese constitutional revolution through a close reading of three texts: John Otway Percy Bland’s book Recent Events and Present Policies in China (1912), Lord Cromer’s “Some Problems of Government in Europe and Asia” (1913) and its anonymous Arabic translation “Lord Cromer on China” (1913). Tracing the genealogy of these texts, I compare Cromer’s English original and its Arabic translation, contextualized within the genre of colonial political theory. I argue that the anonymous Nahdawi translator draws upon Lord Cromer’s authority in translating his text in journal article form, but subverts the rhetorical devices European colonizers used to justify colonial rule and uses the signs and symbols of imperial sovereignty to promote constitutionalism in Egypt instead. By leveraging the racist portrayal of the east in European political theory, the Arabic translator uses negative portrayals of China and the far east in order to advocate for political reform in Egypt. Egypt’s position, straddling east and west, allowed Nahdawi intellectuals to use western racism as the shadow of a threat haunting their society if certain reforms were not enacted, establishing a concept of Egyptian society as struggling to position itself on a political spectrum between China and Europe. This sense that Egypt represented an oblique point somewhere between China and Europe demonstrates the way a triangular framework of international relations structured Egypt’s self-identification.

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.

This paper seeks to understand the ways that intellectuals in China saw how the Arabic language mapped onto different communities of readers and writers in China from the late nineteenth century through the 1940s. Given the difficulties of learning and teaching Arabic within the Sino-Muslim community, translation would always be necessary for many or most readers who wanted to read religious texts such as the Qur’an. How, then, did intellectuals discuss commensurability between Arabic and Chinese, especially in light of the vernacular language movement that reached its height during the New Culture and May Fourth Movements (1915–1921)? Through readings of sources in both Chinese and Arabic (including texts in Arabic written by Sino-Muslims), I show how intellectuals in China—Muslim, Manchu, and Han Chinese—used Arabic as an alternative means to discuss the modernization of the Chinese language, a debate nearly always framed in terms of comparisons to the European Renaissance.

This paper identifies racialized literary tropes in North African visions of Japan from the turn of the twentieth century: the promise of civilizational progress and cultural whitening figured in the light of the rising sun and racial debasement in mixed human-animal origins. Mediated in part by French accounts of Japanese culture and translations of its literature, the appearance of these tropes in two instances of anticolonial and decolonial discourse suggests that a distinct racial imaginary emerged in colonial and independent North Africa. The paper thus argues for the significance of these tropes and their image of whiteness to recent scholarly analyses of the construction of blackness in North Africa. It begins with Mustafa Kamil’s 1904 book al-Shams al-mushriqa, which put forth Meiji Japan as a model to Egyptians of state modernization faithful to national character by racializing its notion of progress. Remarking on the legendary origin of the Ainu ethnic minority in northern Japan from the marriage of a Japanese princess to a dog, Kamil asserted that even a people “blackened” with backwardness could become “white” through cultivation and education. Echoing his reformist predecessor al-Tahtawi’s position on the Sudanese, Kamil shifted this discourse into a new civilizational arena that expressed Egypt’s relation a different model of civilized whiteness, as well as to its British occupiers and the Sudan it sought to control, the former offering a solution to the latter situation. The task of navigating these global racial hierarchies returns in the context of cultural decolonization that preoccupied North African intellectuals after independence. There, Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi looks to Japan for an alternative aesthetic model. He draws on the belated French translation of Japanese modernist novelist Junichiro Tanizaki’s 1933 essay L’éloge de l’ombre (1977), which argues that Japanese aesthetics is based on the attenuation of light in shadow, rather than on illumination. Building on exchanges with his compatriot Abdelfattah Kilito, Egyptian friend Jacques Hassoun, and Franco-Chinese colleague François Cheng, Khatibi connects the liminal image of humans turning into dogs to a shadow that always falls on people like the Japanese or Moroccans, who will always seem to bear a stain to European eyes. Even as Japan promised alternatives to European models of racialized domination, this persistent racial inflection shifts whiteness from a predicate of progress to a reified marker of difference.