Between 1937 and 1939, a series of extraordinary encounters took place in Cairo, London, Bombay, and Delhi. They involved an overlapping cast of Egyptian and Indian politicians: Christians, Muslims, and Hindus; the leaders of their countries’ preeminent political blocs. What they all had in common was the cause of national emancipation from British rule. Beyond this, their interests and ideologies were frequently divergent—that is, when they were not in open conflict. This paper traces the arc of relations between three nationalist movements operating within the context of the British Empire in the late 1930s and early '40s: the Egyptian Wafd, the Indian National Congress, and the All-India Muslim League. It describes the involvement of the Muslim League in Egyptian-led diplomatic efforts surrounding the Palestine crisis; the burgeoning personal friendship and political alliance between Mustapha al-Nahhas, leader of the Wafd, and Jawaharlal Nehru, President of the INC; and the month-long tour of India undertaken by a Wafd delegation in the spring of 1939, during which they met with both Mohandas K. Gandhi and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. I argue that domestic politics in Egypt and India contributed to shaping the dynamics of these transnational relationships, as did the shifting character of their interactions with the British imperial state in the years immediately preceding the Second World War. The paper concludes with a comparative reflection on the ways in which these three political parties saw their destinies transformed in the crucible of that global conflict. Research for this paper has included extensive consultation of British archival collections (primarily Foreign Office, Colonial Office and India Office Records), as well as Indian state archives; Egyptian and Indian newspaper archives; private papers; and published memoirs and biographies. It draws on and extends the work undertaken by historians of Egyptian-Indian nationalist collaboration, and interwar Indian pan-Islam, while demonstrating, through original research and analysis, the ways in which Indian sources can enrich our understanding of Arab history—and vice-versa.

This paper systematically takes up the under-studied topic of the status of “China” in modern Arabic thought in order to rethink the interrelations and limits of concepts such as nation and umma in the early twentieth century. The Arabic press began publishing articles on China, and Islam in China, in the late 1890s, in both secular nationalist and Islamic transnationalist modes. This paper divides this coverage into three periods. The first, coinciding with the last three decades of the Ottoman Empire, was characterized by a sense of mystery and unconquered distance, as well as consistent intermediation by Orientalist figures and their writings, visible in the writings of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Muhammad ‘Abduh, Lebanese Christians, and Shakib Arslan. The second, coinciding with Ottoman and Qing collapse, the First World War, the Paris peace conference, and the 1919 Egyptian revolution, came to see China instead as a fellow nation-state attempting to remove the shackles of tradition and imperialism. The third, lasting for the 1930s and 1940s, consists of a forgotten episode in Egypt’s “crisis of orientation” and increasing gravitation toward an Islamo-Easternist mood. Islamic thinkers and activists such as Rashid Rida, Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, Ahmad Amin, and Hassan al-Banna all commented on current events in China, aspects of Chinese culture, and Islam in China. They also forged partnerships with the aspiring Chinese Muslim ulama studying at al-Azhar, who joined the conversation on China and its relationship to the destiny of the umma by contributing to al-Fath, al-Risala, and Muslim Brotherhood publications. This third phase, while bringing a long-sought direct dialogue not mediated by Orientalists, nevertheless coincided with forms of re-Orientalization: Arabic audiences were interested in China, for example, as a source of Confucianism and other “ancient Eastern philosophies.” Overall, a tension emerged throughout these writings as to whether China should be seen as connected to the Islamic umma by virtue of its large Muslim population, or as an Eastern nation-state to consider emulating (alongside Japan, India, or Turkey). At the same time, the Arabic press and al-Azhar fundamentally shaped the self-narratives of Muslims in modern China: the Chinese Azharites’ accounts of Islamic history and identity, inspired by al-Azhar’s Islamic modernism, eventually become naturalized as the virtually uncontested canonical truth of Chinese Islam to this day.

This paper examines the oceanic itineraries of Muhammad al-Zubayri, a Yemeni poet and revolutionary activist who spent four years (1948-52) as a political exile in the newly established state of Pakistan. It was during this time, that he was introduced to the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal (d. 1938), considered the poet-philosopher of Pakistan, whom he spent considerable time translating. Drawing on his political and literary engagement with Pakistan/Iqbal, this paper is an attempt to problematize the concept of “cosmopolitanism” as it has been deployed by historians and historically minded scholars of the Arabian Peninsula and the Indian Ocean world (Bose, Ho, Hofmeyr, Frost, etc). Rather than accepting idealist or liberatory accounts of cosmopolitanism, it instead looks at the ethical possibilities of translation as it intersects with the transnation. In what ways does the critical dyad translation/transnation simultaneously disclose and foreclose political and ethical possibilities that are often left unconsidered in accounts of the cosmopolitan Indian Ocean? And in what ways was the cosmopolitan project of "welcoming" (in Derrida's reading of Levinas) dependent on language as much as it was the state? This paper draws on the collected Arabic writings of Muhammad al-Zubayri in addition to memoirs and essays by contemporaries in Arabic and Urdu.