Re-Orientation

The Chinese Azharites between Umma and Third World, 1938– 55

John T. Chen

Eastern knowledge for the self; Western knowledge for use.

—Motto of the Chinese Self- Strengthening Movement, 1860s – 1890s

It is the appearance of strength which has led the Orientals to imitate Europeans in matters in which
there is no proit, without perfecting their knowledge of its sources.
—Muhammad Abduh in Muhammad Rashid Rida, Tarikh al- Ustadh al- Imam al- Shaykh Muhammad Abduh
(The Instructor and Imam Sheikh Muhammad Abduh: A History)

He was bitter about the contempt the West showed for the countries of the East: “With all our
centuries of civilization, with all our contributions to the human race, all we get from the West is
humiliation.” His themes throughout the day were: 1. We must have independence. 2. The meaning of
independence, and this is the only meaning, is that we will be our own masters. 3. If we are our own
masters, we can equal the West. 4. If we can equal, we can surpass. When we can do that, he argued,
when we surpass the West, we will shift the world’s center of gravity back to the East.
—Recollection of Zhou Enlai’s advice to Gamal Abdel Nasser, December 1963

An Islamic Knowledge Quest in Text and Context

n 23 March 1938, a delegation of ifteen accomplished Chinese Muslim scholars hailing from all

O corners of China arrived in Cairo — a bustling center full of modern vigor and millennial gravi-
tas, one that commands such epithets as “City Victorious,” “Cradle of Civilization,” and “Mother
of the World.”1 Having made a two-month journey by steamship and rail, the delegation was being sup-
ported by both the Chinese Republic and the Egyptian crown “to receive training in Islamic and Arabic
knowledge in the proper and correct way at the Noble Azhar.”2 Al-Azhar, for centuries a world-renowned
center of Islamic learning, occupied the heart of Cairo’s Muslim quarter: one whose skyline was still
pierced by minarets, whose din was still lulled ive times a day by the call to prayer, whose people still

This essay originated in a 2012 seminar with Zvi Ben-Dor Benite and was
further developed in a seminar with Anupama Rao. I am grateful to Pro-
fessor Rao for her valuable feedback on this project and for helping to
identify a multitude of novel connections with the other essays in this
issue. I am also grateful to those who took the time to read and comment
on drafts: Rashid Khalidi, Eugenia Lean, Ulug Kuzuoglu, Angela Giordani,
and Aaron Rock-Singer. Unless otherwise noted, all Arabic and Chinese
translations are mine.
1. Information on the Chinese Azharite delegations can be found in Ben-
Dor Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt,” as well as Mao, “Muslim Vision for the
Chinese Nation.” A description of the 23 March 1938 arrival in Cairo can
be found in Pang, China and Islam, 96 – 103, and Pang, Aiji Jiunian (Nine
Years in Egypt), 31. Page numbers for Aiji Jiunian refer to the 1988 edition
published by the Chinese Islamic Association.
2. Pang, China and Islam, 71.

24 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

Vol. 34, No. 1, 2014 • doi 10.1215/1089201x-2648560 • © 2014 by Duke University Press
 John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 25

spoke Arabic and donned traditional garb — fea-
tures absent from most Chinese mosques and Mus-
lim neighborhoods since the Ming Dynasty (AD
1368 – 1644).3 From the perspective of the Chinese
Azharites (Arabic: al-.sīniyīn al- azhariyīn; Chinese:
liu ai huizu xueshengpai),4 if there was a place in the
world that could lead them to a more authentic un-
derstanding of Islam, that could become a crucible
of purposeful thought and action, and that could
provide answers to the most pressing questions of
the day, that place had to be Cairo.5
Though they called themselves “students”
(Arabic: t.ullāb; Chinese: xuesheng), the Chinese
Azharites were in fact mature scholars who had
worked as imams, authors, professors, transla-
tors, and Arabic instructors in cities and prov-
inces across China. Numbering three dozen in
total, they counted themselves mostly among the
huizu, or “Hui people”— China’s largest, most
geographically diffuse Muslim population that
traces its roots to Arab and Persian traders arriv-
ing beginning in the Tang Dynasty (AD 618 – 907).
Journeying to Cairo in six delegations from 1931
to 1947, the Chinese Azharites translated the Is-
lamic reformist thought of authorities such as
the late Azhar Grand Mufti Muhammad Abduh
(1849 – 1905) and his disciple Muhammad Rashid
Rida (1865 – 1935) from Arabic to Chinese — in
both the narrower textual sense and the broader
political and cultural sense. Chinese, of course,
was not merely the “target language” of this trans-
lation, but rather was seen as an equivalent epis-
temic tradition through which Islamic thought
and Arab conditions were measured, mediated,
and demystified. This multifaceted, multidirec-
tional process of translation resulted in the forma-
tion of a remarkable bilingual corpus of Islamic
thought that aimed to assert the Chinese Muslims’
place within the broader Islamic world, and to
make an increasingly secular, nationalist China
safe for Islam. In an era of geopolitical and exis-
tential crisis wrought by the Ottoman Empire’s col-
lapse, China’s war with Japan, and the rapid rise
of secular ideologies in both Asia and the Middle
East, the Chinese Azharites’ missions to Egypt pro-
vided an opportunity to reorient China, Islam, and
Chinese Islam on a more auspicious path — an op-
portunity they believed they were seizing through
their writings and translations. Whereas most
scholars of Chinese Islam operate within a Chi-
nese frame of reference, my argument in this essay
is that Islamic reformist thought articulated in
the Arab Middle East — stressing both reason and
revival — formed the spring from which lowed the
Chinese Azharites’ hopes for self- understanding
and sociopolitical progress. Most important, I
trace how the Chinese Azharites came to share
their Arab coreligionists’ view that the principle
of ijtihad, or independent human reasoning, had
given rise to the “golden age” of Islam and now
held the key to modern progress.
The Chinese Azharites’ leader Muhammad
Tawād.u3 Pang (Arabic: ‫)د تواضع بانغ‬, known in
China as Pang Shiqian (Chinese: 龐士謙), made
perhaps the most signiicant contribution to their
bilingual Islamic reformist corpus. This man,
whose name meant “Muhammad the Humble,”
was an accomplished imam, thoughtful scholar,
and proliic commentator on the afairs of the Is-
lamic world and the Chinese Hui.6 Tawād.u3 Pang
had worked in Henan, Shandong, and Beijing be-
fore being named to the 1938 Azhar delegation at
the relatively young age of thirty- six. The details of
the selection process are not fully known, but his
superior Arabic language abilities and recent pub-
lication of a lengthy article on madrassa education
in China were undoubtedly prime criteria.7 He en-
rolled at al-Azhar for the remainder of 1938, made
the hajj to Mecca in summer 1939, completed two
substantial translations of Quranic exegesis while

3. Ben-Dor Benite, “Follow the White Camel,”
422.
4. “Chinese Azharite” (al-Sı̄nı̄ al-Azharı̄) was the
term Hassan al-Banna used to describe Tawād.u3
Pang in his foreword to the book China and
Islam. Similar Chinese terms were used by the
Chinese Azharites themselves.
5. Michael Laffan has provided an illuminating
study of a similar set of connections to Cairo
made by the Indonesian Jawis. See Laffan, “An
Indonesian Community.”
6. “Tawād.u3 ” was an Arabization of the third
character of Pang’s Chinese name (qian). He
is referred to as Tawād.u3 Pang in this article
in keeping with his own apparent preference
(used for example in China and Islam, 99).
The other Chinese Azharites also used bilin-
gual names, the first part Arabic, the second
Chinese. The Arabic names were ones bearing
Islamic significance, often ones that had be-
longed to Companions of the Prophet or promi-
nent leaders of the umma.
7. See Pang, “Zhongguo huijiaosiyuan jiaoyu zhi
yange ji keben.”
26 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
the British kept Cairo under wartime martial law,
and authored several of his own articles evincing a
growing interest in Arab and Islamic world politics
by the mid-1940s.8 The fact that he remained in
Egypt a total of nine years—far longer than the cus-
tomary two to four, and well after the perils of trav-
eling during World War II had passed — indicates
the depth of his connection to Cairo. During this
time, he not only held the title of Head of the Chi-
nese Azhar Delegations and completed the above-
mentioned work, but also became deeply involved
in the activist politics of the nascent Egyptian Mus-
lim Brotherhood, which was undergoing its period
of most rapid expansion at that time.
This essay focuses on the product of that re-
lationship: Tawād.u3 Pang’s Arabic- language mag-
num opus, China and Islam, published by the Mus-
lim Brotherhood in May 1945. This book, which
introduced Arabic- speaking audiences to China
and Chinese Islam in unprecedented detail, was
in fact far more than a mere linguistic achieve-
ment or gesture of cultural diplomacy. Rather, it
expressed a set of political and intellectual posi-
tions that were radically new, yet also in touch
with broader Islamic reformist currents. Specii-
cally, it wove together four strands of thought,
each of which will occupy a section of this essay:
it understood Hui history as inseparable from Is-
lamic history generally; it responded to the geo-
political crisis brought by Ottoman and Qing col-
lapse, Japanese imperialism, secular nationalism,
and war; it identiied the concerns of Muslims in
Egypt and China as one and the same, both groups
being part of the global community of believers, or
umma; and it located a solution to these issues in a
return to the robust intra-Asian relations and prin-
ciples of faithful reason that had supposedly given
rise to Islam’s “golden age.” Collectively, these four
strands of thought embodied an aspiration to re-
8. Some of these events are recounted in Pang,
Aiji Jiunian, 31 – 37. Pang’s writings during this
very productive period included “Gulan yijie”;
“Renzhuxue yurenzhuxuejia”; “Lun alabo lian-
meng”; “Zhongguo huijiao liuai xuesheng de
yange yu jianglai”; and “Wei yinni zhanzheng
xiang quanguo tongbao qingming.”
9. The term “re- Orientation” alludes to the
debate over the Egyptian intellectuals’ “crisis
of orientation” in the 1930s, originally raised
by Nadav Safran in Egypt in Search of Political
Community and developed by Charles D. Smith
• 34:1 • 2014
vitalize Islamic and “Eastern” connections as the
basis for achieving social progress as well as for es-
tablishing a new transnational politics mirroring
past eras of greatness. For the sake of both brevity
and evocativeness, I refer to this body of thought
and sentiment as the desire for “re- Orientation.”9
The desire for re- Orientation runs through
all four strands of Tawād.u3 Pang’s thought. First,
with respect to his understanding of Islamic his-
tory, China and Islam shows that the Tawād.u3 Pang
imagined the Chinese Azharites’ mission to Egypt
as part of an old and storied pattern of Sino–Middle
Eastern interaction bound together by Islamic
practices of knowledge exchange, particularly a
form of exchange I term “textual transnational-
ism.” As others have already noted, the Chinese
Azharites saw their journey as both an Islamic
knowledge quest (rih. la fī .t alab al- 3ilm) and a re-
turn ( 3awda) to a long- lost Islamic heartland.10
Such exchanges ensured Hui participation in the
evolution of a broader Islamic world that often
overlooked them. In other words, China and Islam
represented an attempt to write Chinese Islam, past
and present, into the history of Islam in general. It
accomplished this directly through its retelling of
certain versions of early Hui history and indirectly
by reflecting values and practices of knowledge
transmission found elsewhere in the Islamic world.
Second, these long-term imperatives of iden-
tity and history went hand in hand with a geopo-
litical imperative to strengthen Asian states. Faced
with the recent collapse of the Ottoman and Qing
imperial systems, with respect to which they had
long articulated their identity; deeply wary of
Japanese imperialism in Asia and the impact of
the Sino- Japanese War; and entering an Egyptian
milieu full of tension, activity, and ferment, the
Chinese Azharites saw their mission in Cairo as no
less than to determine the Hui’s place within the
in “The ‘Crisis of Orientation.’ ” Andre Gunder another derivative of which appears in the
Frank uses a similarly provocative term in his phrase “knowledge quest” (rih.la fı̄ t.alab al-3ilm)—
book ReOrient, though from a perspective of literally designates the condition of seeking
global economy and world-systems theory not knowledge, particularly if one seeks special
adopted here. knowledge unavailable to the uninitiated. Ben-
Dor Benite points out the dual status of the
10. The fact that Tawād.u3 Pang referred to the
Chinese Azharites’ journey as both knowledge
delegates not as intellectuals (mufakkirūn) but
quest and return in “Nine Years in Egypt,” 105,
as t. ullāb speaks to this self- perception. The
112. He in turn references a similar point made
now-standard translation “students” does not
in Gillette, Between Mecca and Beijing, 75–76.
do justice to the function of the word t.ullāb in
Tawād.u3 Pang’s context. Tālib (pl. tullāb), the
active participle of the verb t.alaba, “to seek”—
 John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 27

global community of believers and to help ensure
that community’s survival in a rapidly changing
world. The Hui aspiration to fuller inclusion in
the Islamic world dated back to early twentieth-
century contacts with the Ottoman Empire, accom-
panying the reimagining of the idea of the Islamic
world itself.11 In the wake of Ottoman dissolution,
Tawād.u3 Pang and his fellow Hui scholars went to
Cairo not only because al-Azhar was located there
but also because Egypt seemed poised to become
the Islamic world’s new center of gravity, one that
could provide the Hui partnership and protec-
tion in uncertain times. Simultaneously, Japan’s
transformation into an imperialist power, its inva-
sion and occupation of China, and its attempts to
manipulate Hui communities for its own ends lent
urgency to the Chinese Azharites’ mission.
Third, China and Islam viewed Egypt and
China as equivalent inheritors of “ancient civiliza-
tions,” as struggling against equivalent challenges
of imperialism and underdevelopment, and as
potentially beneitting from an equivalent turn to-
ward Islam. Interwar and wartime Cairo was the
ultimate stage on which Tawād.u3 Pang could as-
sert this commonality and enact his membership
in the global umma, moving from Islam’s frontiers
to its center. For one, he was lending his voice to
an argument among Egyptian intellectuals that
connections with Islam and the East needed to be
revived. Moreover, rather than taking sides in the
growing rivalry between al-Azhar and the Brother-
hood, his book China and Islam built an unlikely
bridge between the reserved, academic tenor of
the former and the restless activism of the latter.
Although the basic purpose of China and Islam was
to introduce China and Chinese Islam to Arabic
speakers, the irst portion of the book speaks to
deeper concerns, containing a foreword by Mus-
lim Brotherhood leader Hassan al- Banna as well
as an introduction by Tawād.u3 Pang, both of which
laid out the idea of a global community of Muslims
united by doctrine and Easterners united by com-
mon culture and common interests.
Fourth, with respect to Tawād.u3 Pang’s in-
tellectual genealogy and contribution, China and
Islam illustrated the resonance of Arab Islamic re-
formist thought far outside the Middle East and
clarified the ideology and perceived stakes be-
hind pursuing stronger Sino- Middle Eastern re-
lations through Islam. In his book, Tawād.u3 Pang
absorbed and built upon the foundations laid by
Abduh and Rida, and did so in a way that melded
with the imperatives of Hassan al- Banna and
the Muslim Brotherhood. Speciically, he identi-
ied the Islamic reformist concepts of the Islamic
golden age (al- 3as. r al- dhahabī) and independent
human reasoning (ijtihad) as the foundation for
imagining a new transnationalism based on a sym-
biosis between Islam and the East. This ability to
invoke both progressive reform and a return to
the glorious past in a single breath strikes twenty-
irst- century ears as contradictory. But to Tawād.u3
Pang there was no contradiction, for as with his
Middle Eastern counterparts, and in contrast to
more rigidly progressivist Western ideologies like
liberalism or Marxism, Islamic reformist thought
posited harmony rather than opposition between
the imperatives of past and future.12 Much more
than an end in itself, recovering an atrophied
ethos of reason and invention would lay the foun-
dations of a new unity for the entire Islamic com-
munity, no matter how far-lung the believers may
be. Even though Tawād.u3 Pang seldom engaged
with Western thought and in all likelihood did
not see himself as an “intellectual” in the West-
ern sense, this commitment to faithful reason and
conviction that achieving progress in the present
depended on preserving elements of the Islamic
and “Eastern” past posed a fundamental challenge
to Enlightenment- based understandings of time,
space, and polity.
Building on previous scholarship in Chinese,
Islamic, and global history, I argue that the Chi-
nese Azharites’ position at the nexus of the Islamic
world and China formed the basis not of their
marginalization but of a unique form of global-

11. See, e.g., Aydin, “Globalizing the Intellectual
History.”
12. This line of thought had parallels among
Han Chinese reformists. Since the late nine-
teenth century, thinkers like Zhang Taiyan,
Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao had developed
and debated ideas about the golden age and
the linearity of historical time. The Chinese ge-
nealogies of Tawād.u3 Pang’s thought is a sub-
ject I discuss elsewhere. See, e.g., Murthy, Po-
litical Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan; Tang, Global
Space; and Karl and Zarrow, Rethinking the 1898
Reform Period.
28 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 34:1 • 2014

ism based on the translation of Islamic reformist
thought. This enterprise was only possible in an
age of global capital and modern transport and
communication technologies, but its context and
its genealogies cannot be reduced to “metropole
versus colony” or “West versus non-West” relation-
ships.13 Decoupling interstitiality from marginal-
ity, and decoupling globalism from the fraught
encounter between West and non-West, I suggest
that individuals such as Tawād.u3 Pang who crossed
(or simply had little regard for) physical and con-
ceptual boundaries in fact played a significant
role in a century seemingly dominated by the
proliferation and consolidation of nation- states
and the persistence of Enlightenment notions of
linear progress. Tawād.u3 Pang’s major intellectual
and political contribution was to argue that for
centuries, China and the Middle East had existed
within a system of intra-Asian exchange — and that
the modern world’s demand for progress might be
well served by preserving rather than erasing that
system. That system, however, was under threat
from the nation- state. Indeed, it is only in a world
of nation- states that Tawād.u3 Pang’s identity seems
contradictory, his career extraordinary, his ideas
on intra- Asian community fantastical.14 The irony
is that these very ideas were co- opted by newly in-
dependent Third World nation- states soon after he
returned to China in 1947. To this end, this essay
closes by carrying Tawād.u3 Pang’s intellectual and
political genealogy into the 1950s, proposing a re-
vised understanding of the role of Islamic thought
in the origins of the Third World, and pointing
out that the memory of interstitial igures such as
Tawād.u3 Pang was all but lost thereafter. His book
China and Islam thus afords a rare glimpse into a
recent yet forgotten moment when the blurring of
distinctions between religion and politics, past and
present, national and transnational, paradoxically
helped guarantee a world dominated by secular,
progressivist nation- states. Tawād.u3 Pang’s story
reveals how the Chinese Azharites’ translations of
Islamic reformist thought — including their identi-
ication with Islamic history, their multicontinen-
tal political activism, their commensuration of
conditions in Egypt and China, and their reform-
ist revivalism — helped forge a postcolonial vision
of political community indebted yet antithetical to
their own.
The Chinese Azharites as Chinese, Islamic,
and Global History
It has been said that prior to the modern period,
Islam was the most globalized of the world’s reli-
gions.15 This alone is a controversial statement. Yet
one could go even further and contend that it was
also the most globalized in the modern period.16 In
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
Muslim societies saw the rise of movements that
aspired to reform, redeine, and unite the entire
umma. Islamic politics emerged partly in response
to a more aggressive phase of European imperial-
ism sparked by the 1873 depression, the dismem-
berment of the Ottoman Empire’s European ter-
ritories after the 1877 – 78 Russo-Turkish War, the
“Scramble for Africa” inaugurated by the Berlin
Conference of 1884 – 85, and the ossification of
European alliances and intensiication of rivalries
due to Germany’s rapid rise. At the same time, Is-
lamic politics also arose as an alternative to the be-
leaguered state-led reform eforts in the Ottoman
Empire and elsewhere. This Islamic reformism ad-
mitted no hard- and-fast distinction between faith
and politics or mosque and state. Operating in-
stead on the holistic level of “civilization” or “soci-
ety,” the ideas of Islamic reformists such as Abduh
and Rida found adherents and elicited responses
through vast expanses of Asia, Africa, and the
Middle East. It is ironic, then, that conventional
histories of Islamic reformism have characterized
it as a confrontation and dialogue with the “West”:
a drive to counter the impact of imperialism, a

13. The impact of modern transportation and
communication technologies on Islamic net-
works is thoroughly discussed in the recently
published volume by Gelvin and Green, Global
Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print.
14. The nation-state’s grip over the historical
imagination is effectively critiqued in Duara,
Rescuing History from the Nation.
15. See Hefner, “Introduction: Muslims and
Modernity,” 1. See also Voll, “Islam as a Spe-
cial World System,” which drew on the works
of Wallerstein, Frank, and Braudel to provide
a richer characterization of Islam than simply
calling it a “religion” or a “civilization” in the
manner of H. A. R. Gibb or Marshall Hodgson.
16. This statement must be qualified by the
fact that the contemporaneous ecumenical
movement in Protestantism was character-
ized by arguments and aims strikingly similar
to those of Islamic reformism, though with sev-
eral important differences. I am grateful to Jus-
tin Reynolds for introducing me to this fruitful
comparison.
 John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 29

reception of Enlightenment notions of progress
and Comtean positivism, and an attempt to recon-
cile Islamic religion with Western science.17 Tell-
ing the history of Islamic reform in this way — as
a struggle to harmonize “faith and reason” — not
only overstates the role of the West as an actor, but
also overstates the extent to which the Western ex-
perience (and indeed, the Christian experience)
can be seen as an analog and precursor to that his-
tory.18 In fact, for many Islamic reformists — includ-
ing Abduh, Rida, and in turn, Tawād.u3 Pang — the
principle of ijtihad enshrined reason as a central
tenet of Islamic life in harmony with belief; more-
over, in seeking to revive a past golden age, this
principle called to the fore promising relationships
with the East in contrast to fraught relationships
with the West.
The turbulent interwar period represented
a unique phase in the history of Islamic reform-
ism. It was at this time when Islamic reformist ideas
were recast and tied more fully to social and politi-
cal action, as with the Egyptian Muslim Brother-
hood. Globally speaking, the timing makes sense.
This was a moment when nationalisms and trans-
nationalisms coexisted and melded into one an-
other. This was also a moment when “newness was
coming into the world” in the form of anticolonial
revolt, mass politics, Soviet Marxism, and Ameri-
can Wilsonianism, with their anti-imperialist and
emancipatory potentials.19 This period — with its
empires unwilling to die and its nations unable to
be born — was a time of great uncertainty but also
a time of unprecedented globalism.
Tawād.u3 Pang’s Islamic reformism had much
in common with other interwar transnational-
isms, but it stood somewhat apart to the extent
that it envisioned newness as a return to the old:
a re- Orientation. Arguably, one common feature
of Islamic reformist thought — be it among the
Azhar masters, the Indian Khilafat movement,
the Indonesian Jawis, the Central Asian Jadidists,
or the Chinese Hui — was the longing to recover
an earlier age when Islamic networks dominated
Eurasian commerce and culture. While existing
scholarship typically emphasizes these movements’
drive to modernize their respective societies in re-
sponse to the inluence and incursion of the West,
less often emphasized is how they looked irst to
Istanbul, later to Cairo, and also to one another
for intellectual and political inspiration — not only
out of interest or envy, but out of a “memory” they
were constructing of the premodern interconnect-
edness of the East. Thus, Islamic reformist aspira-
tions to re- Orientation originated not only in the
“hub-and- spokes” relationship of metropole to col-
ony but also in the seldom- examined relationships
between diferent non-European countries and re-
gions. These relationships possess their own loci,
logics, and lineages outside those determined by
Western dominance and the systems of knowledge
that dominance generated. That being said, this
essay also resists blanket characterizations such
as “non-Western” or “periphery,” terms that have
been used in other attempts to think about history
outside the West. The “East” was not an objective
category to be mapped or measured but a subjec-
tive component of the Chinese Azharites’ thought:
one they did not believe to be a modern subaltern
periphery but rather a once-hegemonic core. Sim-
ply put, I am not fetishizing a “new Silk Road,” but
tracing the emergence of a new and much more
consequential idea about transnational political
community.
The preoccupation with the faith- versus-
reason debate specifically and the centrality of
the West generally has overshadowed the fact that
Islamic reformism also sought to answer precisely
this question about unity and community in the
East. Islamic reformist ideas and writings came to
resonate far outside the Middle East in ways that
neither Westerners nor Middle Easterners neces-
sarily anticipated: for example, as Zvi Ben- Dor
Benite has pointed out, many articles in the Hui
journal Yuehua were translations of Arabic articles
that originally appeared in Cairo-based Islamic re-
formist periodicals such as Rashid Rida’s al-Manar

17. Consider, for example, Keddie, Islamic Re-
sponse to Imperialism; Kedourie, Afghani and
Abduh; and Kerr, Islamic Reform.
18. The tendency to take European history as
the chronological and substantive model for
the development of all modern societies has
been thoroughly critiqued in Chakrabarty, Pro-
vincializing Europe.
19. The concept of “newness coming into the
world” is discussed in Bhabha, Location of Cul-
ture, chap. 13. Islamic reformism is typically not
emphasized in histories of intellectual and po-
litical “newness” in the interwar period, the
focus falling instead on secular ideologies
such as Marxism, Leninism, and anticolonial
nationalism.
30 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 34:1 • 2014

or Muhib al- Din al- Khatib’s al- Fath.20 In order
to understand, for example, how the Chinese
Azharites and the Muslim Brotherhood became
important to each other’s visions for the umma,
we must focus on the communitarian aspect of
Islamic reformism and give due consideration to
Islamic reformism’s multiple afterlives outside the
Middle East.21 Put differently, the history of the
Chinese Azharites cannot be reduced to a manifes-
tation of any familiar teleology, be it the marginal-
ization of subaltern igures, the fraught encounter
between traditionalism and modernity, or for that
matter the consolidation of the Chinese or Egyp-
tian nation- state — let alone the inevitable “clash”
between Islam and the West. Instead, it must be
understood in terms of a global history of Islamic
reform.
With this shift of focus, this essay seeks to
build on previous scholarship on the Chinese
Azharites while also pushing Hui history toward
a mutually beneficial engagement with histori-
ographies of modern China, the modern Middle
East, Islamic reform, and global history. Expand-
ing our understanding of the Hui irst demands
moving beyond a category I term “ethnic subalter-
nity.” This category has formed at the intersection
of three important strands of scholarly work over
the past several decades. The irst strand decon-
structs notions of the primordial nation, seeing it
instead as an “imagined community” whose self-
consciousness arises contingently from patterns of
cultural and material relations, as well as from the
equally contingent processes in which the nation
sometimes achieves statehood.22 The second strand
seeks to recover the histories of disempowered in-
dividual or collective subjects (or, alternatively,
to ask whether such a recovery is possible).23 The
third strand takes the subtle pervasiveness of state
power and its discourses as the most important
constituent factor of modern subjectivity.24 The
combination of these three strands of scholarship
has had a profound impact on our understanding
of marginalized groups. One important result of
this conluence, as far as this essay is concerned, is
that histories of Islam and Muslims in China have
remained both centered in China and focused on
the material and cultural processes by which the
Hui’s subaltern status and ethnic identity were con-
structed and imagined, within and with respect to
the “container” of the Chinese empire and, later,
the Chinese nation- state. It is worth remembering
that the early to mid- twentieth century was pre-
cisely the moment when secular nationalist leaders
like Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Sun Yatsen, Gamal
Abdel Nasser, and Mao Zedong were subordinat-
ing religious categories of identity to ethnic and
national ones. Therefore, deconstructing the state-
led process of “ethnogenesis” must be balanced by
the fact that even in China, being Muslim meant
much more than simply belonging to an ethnic mi-
nority. The history of the Chinese Azharites shows
that the Hui did not always articulate their place in
the world in a manner consistent with our image of
minority groups; what they sought was neither the
recognition of their rights nor the redressing of
others’ wrongs, but something much more expan-
sive. Those more expansive aspirations can only be
accessed by adopting an interregional perspective
and recognizing the important role played in this
history by Islamic thought and belief.
To this we might add that the language of hy-
bridity, while recovering some of the Islamic con-
tent and capturing the cultural ambidexterity em-
bodied and practiced by the Hui at various points
in their history, still relies on notions of ethnic sub-
alternity — for after all, the basic building blocks
of hybridity are still nations and ethnicities. The
term “Chinese Muslim” itself is problematic, be-
cause it seeks to hybridize two nonequivalent, arti-
icially primordialized categories: Islamic religion
and Chinese ethno-nationality. Ben-Dor Benite, in
The Dao of Muhammad, deftly explores how these
two seemingly contradictory identities interacted
and were reconciled by Qing- era Hui scholars, who

20. See Ben-Dor Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt,”
108.
21. Dru Gladney has applied Lila Abu-Lughod’s
concept of “zones of theory” to critique the eli-
sion of East Asia from histories of Islam, where
it was usually seen as “peripheral” to the Mid-
dle Eastern “core.” See Gladney, “Islam,” and
Abu-Lughod, “Zones of Theory.”
22. See especially Anderson, Imagined Commu-
nities; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; and
Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition.
23. See especially Spivak, “Can the Subaltern
Speak?”
24. The works of Michel Foucault have been
most inluential in this area. In the ield of Chi-
nese Islam, the modern ethnogenesis of the
Hui, state- driven and otherwise, is thoroughly
covered in Lipman, Familiar Strangers, chap. 5,
and in Gladney, Muslim Chinese.

successfully equated their status with that of “Chi-
nese” literati through educational networks based
on the han kitab (i.e., “the Chinese book of Islamic
learning” or “Chinese Islamic canon”).25 This
framework of paradoxical hybridization works ex-
tremely well for understanding the Hui in their
Chinese context. It also informs Ben- Dor Benite’s
work on the Chinese Azharites, insofar as their in-
terwar journeys to Egypt were a means for them to
overcome their “doubly exiled” status. Neverthe-
less, while this perspective captures the contradic-
tions that inhere in Hui identity, it can also over-
state some of those contradictions once we begin to
take both China and the Middle East into account.
In other words, the imperfect category of “Chinese
Muslim” or “Muslim Chinese” should not necessar-
ily be taken as a mixture of two primordial quanti-
ties “Chineseness” and “Muslimness” — but rather
as something unique and sufficient unto itself.
Tawād.u3 Pang’s China and Islam shows that at least
some Hui thought of themselves irst and foremost
as members of multiple amorphous, overlapping
transnational communities, two of which were the
umma and the East, rather than as Chinese, Hui,
or any other ethnicity. Put diferently, the Hui did
not necessarily see their Muslimness and their
Chineseness as mutually contradictory statuses
in need of reconciliation in the way we observers
(or, for that matter, the Chinese state) might. The
depth of their integration into their Egyptian en-
virons indicates that they saw themselves as distinc-
tive but not alien: as members of the umma who
happened to be from the land of China, with both
categories belonging to the East.
Just as ethnicity was not the only point of ref-
erence for Hui identity, the nation- state was not
the only point of reference for their politics. In her
article “A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation,”
Yufeng Mao argues that the Qing- Republican
transition “gave Sino- Muslim modernists an op-
portunity to promote an alternative vision of the
Chinese nation- state that empowered Muslims in
China,” one in which the Hui “would participate
in representative politics as a key political group
(with Sino-Muslims also representing the interests
of Uighur Muslims in the nation), play an indis-
25. Ben-Dor Benite, Dao of Muhammad. 26. Mao, “Muslim Vision for the Chinese Na-
tion,” 375–76.
John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 31
pensable role in China’s national survival, and
become a bridge in a proposed Chinese- Islamic
alliance.”26 While this framework illuminates the
geopolitical dimensions of the Hui missions to the
Middle East, the history of the Chinese Azharites
shows that the objective of the Cairo and Mecca
delegations was not merely to utilize Muslim con-
nections as a means of strengthening or modern-
izing the Chinese nation as such. It was also to
reactivate an older, prenational, substantively dif-
ferent system of Islamic and intra- Asian connec-
tions. While this reactivation would yield beneits
for China, Egypt, and other nations, Islamic rela-
tions were not merely a subset of China’s (inter)
national relations. Furthermore, Mao’s use of the
category of “Islamic modernism” — deined as the
“common desire to reconcile the traditions of
Islam with modern ideas such as constitutionalism,
industrial development, secular education, and na-
tionalism” — risks overemphasizing the nation as
the main reference point for Hui consciousness.27
As such, it also risks giving a bit too much credence
to the equation of Western liberal, secular, and na-
tionalist principles with modernity.
This essay does not seek to undo the accom-
plishments of previous scholarship. On the con-
trary, it seeks to build on and toward that work
from the Middle Eastern, Islamic, and global sides
of the picture. It does this by making use of Ara-
bic sources such as Tawād.u3 Pang’s China and Islam
and by delving into the Chinese Azharites’ Islamic
thought and belief. On this point, it is worth noting
that histories both before and after the “cultural
turn,” following a core element of Marxist thought,
have tended to privilege material relations as the
most fundamental determinant of social existence.
This is not to say that we must write “religious” his-
tories of religion, or that we must revert to the es-
sentializing philosophical or philological methods
of the Orientalists, or that we must accept a Webe-
rian inversion that sees foundational ideas (for ex-
ample, the Protestant ethic) as the determinants of
material relations. Rather, it is to suggest that we
must ind an adequate way to account for the reality
of human thought and belief. As Richard Mitchell
writes in his landmark study of the Egyptian Mus-
27. Ibid., 375.
32 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 34:1 • 2014

lim Brotherhood, “In so far as what men believe
to be real, is real, our concern here will be not the
validity of these beliefs, but only the fact of their
existence.”28 Again, the Chinese Azharites seem
to have regarded themselves as Muslims who hap-
pened to be from China, rather than Chinese who
were trying to use their Muslimness in the service
of other more “real” (nationalistic or materialistic)
ends. Moreover, these Chinese Azharites made con-
tributions to Islam that al- Azhar and the Muslim
Brotherhood alike accepted as legitimate; indeed,
one is struck by the lack of evidence that their
Egyptian hosts regarded the Chinese Azharites as
foreigners. The sources demand that we take the
Chinese Azharites’ Muslimness seriously and not
make any “presumption of unbelief.”29 Once we
more fully acknowledge the reality of thought and
belief, we can grasp that the history of the Chinese
Azharites is not one whose contours and relevance
are determined by Western impact, modernity and
globalization, the consolidation of the Chinese
nation- state specifically, or even the idea of the
nation- state generally. Rather, it is a history that
fundamentally challenges the ways in which each
of those broad topics has been understood.
Most global histories of modern China or the
modern Middle East still take the West as a sub-
stantive focal point or at least as a strong concep-
tual reference point: even when they succeed in
talking about non-Westerners, they are still talking
about non-Westerners who were thinking about
the West, either as an actor or as a set of ideas.
In other words, we remain haunted by Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s contention in Provincializing Europe
that it “is impossible to think of [political moder-
nity] anywhere in the world without . . . concepts
that found a climactic form in the course of the
European Enlightenment and the nineteenth cen-
tury.”30 By contrast, a study of a Sino- Middle East-
ern relationship based on Islam is unique insofar
as it presents a body of thought spanning multiple
regions, yet decenters dominant binaries of metro-
pole and colony or East and West. The advantage
of studying this history is that it allows us to tell a
story of China and the Middle East in which the
West is secondary, a story of ideas in which the En-
lightenment legacy is secondary, a story of political
community in which nation- states are secondary, a
story of modernity in which modernization is sec-
ondary, a story of globality in which globalization
is secondary. Tawād.u3 Pang’s deep engagement
with his Egyptian milieu, and his sophisticated
understanding of the interrelations between the
Middle East, Islam, China, and the “East,” brings
these possibilities into sharp relief. In these ways,
it is possible to refrain from relegating the Chi-
nese Muslims to marginal or subaltern historical
status and instead write their history as part of the
global history of the early twentieth century — a
time when people were still moved by memories
of the prenational world. Indeed, some of the his-
tory of the past century was made not by the pow-
erful, the wealthy, or the well-known, but by ordi-
nary yet thoughtful interstitial igures like Tawād.u3
Pang — “Muhammad the Humble” — who in the
crucible of Cairo posited a relationship between
past and present, Islam and East, that struck at the
foundations of modernity and community as con-
ceived by a world of nation- states.
The Chinese Azharites, Islamic History,
and Textual Transnationalism
In Arabic there is a saying: fī- l- h. araka baraka (in
movement lies blessing). After all, the umma had
been created by an act of movement: the hijra (mi-
gration) of the Prophet Muhammad and his fol-
lowers from Mecca to Medina, where they estab-
lished the irst “ideal” Islamic society, followed by
the futūh.āt, or “Muslim conquests,” which in little
over a century incorporated the lands from Anda-
lusia to Central Asia under the banner of Islam.
Rather than ruling conquered lands through blunt
coercion, many Muslims instead settled in those
lands, intermarried, and fostered vast networks of
exchange sometimes called the overland and mari-
time Silk Roads.31 Far from being the static mono-

28. Mitchell, Society of the Muslim Brothers,
209.
29. The phrase “presumption of unbelief”
comes from Craig Calhoun, quoted in John O.
Voll’s foreword to Mitchell, Society of the Mus-
lim Brothers, xii.
30. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 4. and not reducible to a single “Oriental” mono-
lith. See Rezakhani, “Road That Never Was.”
31. The Orientalist connotations of the appella-
Two examples of careful scholarship on the
tion “Silk Road” have been effectively critiqued
“maritime Silk Road,” one of which uses the
in this journal; nevertheless, some scholars
term and the other of which does not, are Ho,
have managed to use this term as shorthand
Graves of Tarim, and Kauz, Aspects of the Mari-
for diverse interactions embedded in localities
time Silk Road.

lith envisioned by outsiders, Islam was all about
movement. Movement was particularly important
in Islamic history because it was tied to knowl-
edge — for ideas, beliefs, and practices traversed
the Muslim- dominated intra- Asian networks
alongside material goods.32 The part- real, part-
constructed memory of this premodern world of
Islamic exchange across the Asian continent fun-
damentally informed Tawād.u3 Pang’s understand-
ing of the Chinese Azharites’ mission to Egypt as
well as his argument that Muslims must work to
revive such a system of intra- Asian relations. This
understanding guided Tawād.u3 Pang as he set out
to write Chinese Islamic history into Islamic his-
tory generally in China and Islam.
Tawād.u3 Pang arguably had some precedents
to use in that endeavor, for in the Islamic imagi-
nation, movement and knowledge had long been
tied literally and iguratively to the remoteness of
China. Hence the Prophet said, “Seeketh knowl-
edge even unto China” (ut. lub al- 3ilm walaw i-l-sīn).33
Though its authenticity is questioned, this Had-
ith conveys the basic relationship between move-
ment and knowledge common to several strands
of Islamic thought and also speaks to the sense
of China’s potentially alienating distance from
the Islamic core. This sense was so entrenched
that Muhammad Abduh opened his essay “The
Spread of Islam” by noting that in the eighth cen-
tury, “the want of nations for reform [al- is.lāh.] was
widespread, and thus God determined that His
inal message of revelation should be widespread
as well. . . . This new religion drew in the entire
Arab world [al- umma al- arabiyya] in less than thirty
years, and in less than a century embraced the re-
maining nations from the Western Ocean to the
Great Wall of China.”34 Thus even in the late nine-
teenth century, China remained the standard met-
onym for the farthest frontier of the umma. The
remoteness of China, however, was never prohibi-
32. Premodern intra- Asian exchange is too
large a ield to summarize here. Some notable
works are Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road;
Elisseeff, Silk Roads; Park, Mapping the Chinese
and Islamic Worlds; and several books by Sanjay
Subrahmanyam.
33. There are several variants of this Hadith. Its
authenticity and translation are not universally
accepted, but it is nevertheless widespread in
popular use. Ben-Dor Benite sees this Hadith as
John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 33
tive but rather was mitigated by the fact that Mus-
lims had lived there for centuries and that Middle
Eastern Muslims such as Ibn Battuta occasionally
traveled there.35 Departing for Egypt in the 1930s,
the Chinese Azharites may have believed them-
selves to be participating in this same tradition of
Muslims’ transcontinental movement in search of
knowledge.
The argument that Tawād.u3 Pang and the
Chinese Azharites viewed themselves in this way
becomes more plausible when we consider the
prominent role of travel tales and knowledge
quests in the Chinese Islamic tradition. The stories
tell of movement from both west to east and east
to west: Muslims from points west seeking refuge
in China in one generation, Muslims from China
seeking knowledge in the west (that is, the Middle
East) in another.36 Most of these stories ind their
origin in Chinese Islam’s irst era of crisis. When
the cultural f luidity of the Yuan Dynasty (AD
1279 – 1368) gave way to the Han ethnocentrism of
the Ming, Muslims in China did not acquiesce to
wholesale assimilation but rather began inventing
(they would say “recording”) a variety of founda-
tion myths through which they explained Islam’s
arrival in China and its accommodating stance
toward the imperial cosmology. According to Ben-
Dor Benite, Qinghai’s Salar Muslims claimed to
have arrived in China many centuries earlier, lee-
ing persecution in Samarqand. They “followed the
lead of a white camel with a Quran strapped to its
head for guidance.”37 In a scene evoking several
other key moments in Islamic history — including
the Caliph ‘Umar’s entrance into Jerusalem, not
to mention the hijra of Muhammad itself — these
Muslims declared that the place where the camel
first sat to rest would become a place of peace
and harmony. When the camel sat in Qinghai,
they knew that the Chinese realm would be safe
for Islam. Other stories tell of a chance encounter
capturing what Edward Said called “intimate 35. See, e.g., Dunn, Adventures of Ibn Battuta,
estrangement,” in this case not between Ori- and Netton, Golden Roads.
entalists and Orientals but between Chinese
36. Several such stories can be found in Ben-
Muslims and Middle Eastern Muslims. See Ben-
Dor Benite, Dao of Muhammad. The parallel
Dor Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt,” 108 – 9, and
with the “journey to the West” motif found
Ben-Dor Benite, “ ‘Even Unto China.’ ”
in non- Muslim Chinese literary traditions is
34. See al- Manar, May 1918 [?], 81, for an ex- self-evident.
cerpt from Muhammad Abduh, “Intishār al-
37. Ben-Dor Benite, “Follow the White Camel,”
islām” (“The Spread of Islam”), originally pub-
409.
lished in Risālat al-tawh.ı̄d (Theology of Unity).
34 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 34:1 • 2014

between a Muslim scholar- traveler and a Confu-
cian one, in which each explains his philosophy
at length. Signiicantly, these stories never result
in the conversion of the Confucian to Islam (as
is often the case in stories where a Muslim meets
a Buddhist) but instead conclude with each side
respectfully acknowledging the legitimacy of the
other.38 In a display of cultural ambidexterity at
work, these parables on the one hand reassured
the Han Chinese by signaling an accommodat-
ing stance toward Confucianism and the imperial
cosmology and on the other hand reassured the
Chinese Muslims by asserting the validity of Islam
vis-à-vis that Chinese system.
Another story of movement and knowledge
in the Chinese Islamic tradition tells of a dialogue
between the Prophet Muhammad and a Chinese
emperor in which the emperor heeds the Prophet’s
call to open China to Islam. One version of this
story appears in Tawād.u3 Pang’s China and Islam:
It is said that one night, there appeared before
the Emperor of Xi a brilliantly shimmering star.
The Emperor commanded his high priest to inter-
pret this auspicious sign, which the priest found
to be proof of the appearance of a man of ex-
traordinary quality in the land of the Arabs. The
Emperor thereupon sent his emissary to ascertain
the truth of the matter. After a year’s travel, the
emissary arrived and met the Prophet of God
(May God’s blessings and peace be upon him!),
inviting him to journey in person to China. [The
Prophet] begged pardon as he himself could
not go, but sent instead four of his Companions,
among them his maternal uncle Sa3d ibn Abī
Waqqās.. All of this transpired in the year AD 587.
It is said that the emissary drew a furtive sketch of
the Prophet, as he had declined the invitation to
visit the Emperor in person. When the Emperor
irst glimpsed the picture of the Prophet (Peace
be upon him!), he worshipped it and hung it on
the wall to pray — but Sa3d ibn Abī Waqqās. forbade
him this, saying: “The Prophet of God prohibits
us from worshipping images and idols. Behold!
There is no worship save that of the One True
God.” Satisied with this irreproachable princi-
ple, the Emperor ordered the construction of a
mosque in Canton, that he might stroll and dwell
peacefully amidst the cool shade of its colonnades.
He named this mosque Huai Sheng — meaning
“Longing for the Prophet.” The structure still
stands to this day.39
The name of the mosque, and the fact that the
Prophet Muhammad never goes to China himself,
is a symbolic acknowledgment of Hui “exile” from
and longing to “return” to the Islamic heartland.
The Chinese emissary and Sa3d ibn Abī Waqqās.,
however, symbolize the possibility of forging con-
nections between China and the Islamic Middle
East. Ibn Abī Waqqās.’s interaction with the em-
peror, furthermore, repeats a common motif of
Middle Eastern Muslim sages or authority igures
imparting texts, proper worship practices, and
basic elements of Islamic doctrine (for example,
drawing or worshipping images of humans is for-
bidden) to the Chinese, whose remoteness has pre-
vented their obtaining such knowledge. Such tales
serve to emphasize the overall compatibility be-
tween Islam and the Chinese imperial cosmology
and to encourage the benign treatment of Mus-
lim communities, hence the emperor’s decision
to fund the construction of a mosque. As a whole,
this tale also speaks to the Hui’s assimilation of
the intimate relationship between movement and
knowledge in Islamic history.
As we can see, one of the glues that held
these relationships of movement and knowledge
together was text. Tawād.u3 Pang’s career provides
insight into an aspect of Islamic thought and prac-
tice that I term “textual transnationalism.”40 This is
meant not so much in narrow reference to formal
practices of religious exegesis but more broadly
to include practices of education, translation, ap-
prenticeship, journalism, print activism and propa-

38. Again, several such stories are related and
analyzed in Ben-Dor Benite, Dao of Muhammad.
39. Pang, China and Islam, 62 – 63. The date
given to this encounter, AD 587, is within the
range in which the Prophet is believed to have
lived (AD 570 – 632), but it is well before he is
believed to have begun receiving revelations,
that is, at age forty, or circa 610. This discrep-
ancy relects the extent to which Chinese Mus-
lims had to “ill in the gaps” over the genera-
tions in the absence of perfect knowledge of
Middle Eastern Islam. At the very least, Tawād.u3
Pang’s story is consistent with that told by an-
other Chinese Azharite, Muhammad Makin,
whose book Overview of the History of Islam
in China contains photographs of the Huai
Sheng Mosque in Canton and, across from it,
a structure claimed to be the tomb of Sa3d ibn
Abı̄ Waqqās..
40. There were of course other forms of trans-
nationalism as well, particularly congressional-
ism (as discussed for example in Kramer, Islam
Assembled) and associationalism (as discussed
in chapter 9 of Tawād.u3 Pang’s China and Islam,
titled “Islamic Associations in China”).

ganda, letter writing, and sharing and exchange of
texts that lourished throughout the Islamic world
and bound its thinkers to a perceived common
purpose across vast distances beginning in the
mid-nineteenth century, and aided greatly by the
spread of printing press technology. This textual
transnationalism, which reached a peak during
the interwar period, was less about debating the
iner points of Islamic doctrine and more about
developing programs for social mobilization, ad-
dressing questions of identity and loyalty, inform-
ing people on how to lead properly pious lives,
confronting challenges of education and modern-
ization, and discussing geopolitics and the future
of the umma. Regarding the last point in particu-
lar, Muslim thinkers devoted tremendous attention
to the question of how to modernize their societies
yet also revivify their past interrelations.
For Tawād.u3 Pang and the Chinese Azharites,
Islamic textual transnationalism possessed a
unique quality derived from the special status ac-
corded to text in most strands of Islamic thought.
The composition of texts was not merely an act of
recording or commenting on the affairs of this
world; rather, it was also an act of struggle in the
name of God (al- jihād fī sabīl illāh) and an act of
independent human reasoning (ijtihad). Islamic re-
formists such as Muhammad Abduh placed great
emphasis on the production of text as a revival of
the process of ijtihad, an emphasis Tawād.u3 Pang
later inherited during his studies at al- Azhar. Thus
Tawād.u3 Pang states in his introduction to China
and Islam,
When scholars and thinkers seek out the causes
that led Muslims irst toward progress and then
to stagnation and decline, the plain and simple
truth will surely emerge that the pious forebears
[al- salaf al-.sālih.] possessed the ability to exert ijti-
had: the capacity for reason and clear- sightedness
in all matters including their understanding of
social reality, which propelled their progress. . . .
As for the period of decline, they claim that “the
door of ijtihad had closed” — a fatal law that has
brought upon Muslims untold woes, such that
their lives have grown dark, their minds provin-
cialized and degenerate.41
41. Pang, China and Islam, xv. Abduh’s posi- 42. Pang, China and Islam, 96 – 97. Muhammad
tions on ijtihad are discussed in Hourani, Ara- Makin’s (Chinese name: Ma Jian) translations
bic Thought in the Liberal Age, 147–49. are discussed at length in Ben-Dor Benite, “Tak-
ing 3Abduh to China.”
John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 35
Tawād.u3 Pang’s words contain a strong echo of
Abduh. In his teaching and writing, Abduh placed
great emphasis on resisting taqlīd and promoting
ijtihad. Abduh praised the role of reason in West-
ern societies and simultaneously argued that Islam
possessed the same germ of rationality that would
help Muslim societies achieve a similar progress,
which would be both modern and a revival of for-
mer greatness. For Islamic reformists, the central-
ity of ijtihad proceeded from its being both a tran-
shistorical form of jihad through which an Islamic
ideal could be upheld and a temporally speciic, ra-
tional, and prescriptive process through which so-
cial and civilizational progress could be achieved.
Tawād.u3 Pang maintained these dual assumptions
about ijtihad in his own writing.
Perhaps this is why Tawād.u3 Pang spends a
good deal of time in China and Islam enumerat-
ing the written works of Chinese Azharites. Take
for example the revealing description of the irst
delegation that Tawād.u3 Pang gives in his eleventh
chapter, “Relations between China and Egypt”:
After the Chinese Islamic Association for Prog-
ress’s Yunnan branch had requested in 1930 to
send a delegation to al- Azhar, the irst such del-
egation arrived on 20 December 1931, chaired by
Professor Muhammad Ibrahim Sha Koujin, who
became the irst sheikh of the Chinese students’
quarters [at al- Azhar]. There were four members
of the delegation: 1. Muhammad Makin of Yun-
nan Province, who had translated Arabic and
English books into Chinese, among them the
Theology of Unity [Risālat al- tawh.īd] and Islam,
Christianity, and Modern Civilization [al- Islām
wa- l- nas. raniyyah ma 3a al- 3ilm wa- l- madaniyyah] by
the wise and venerable Imam Sheikh Muhammad
Abduh; The Truth of the Islamic Religion by Profes-
sor Hussayn al- Jisr; and the English book A History
of Islamic Education. He also translated the Analects
of Confucius into Arabic, and authored the book
Overview of the History of Islam in China and of the
Conditions of the Muslims There.42
Tawād.u3 Pang goes on to relate similar details re-
garding the other delegation members as well as
several other Chinese Azharite delegations. It ap-
pears that translation or authorship was a prereq-
36 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
uisite for participation in the delegations. While
an Orientalist scholar would no doubt attribute
this emphasis on text to the timelessness of the
Word and sanctiication of the Arabic language
in all Islamic thought, I argue instead that textual
transnationalism was a uniquely modern feature
of Islamic reformism in which Muslim thinkers
constructed a history of transcontinental intercon-
nectedness in support of speciic political projects.
Drawing inspiration from an imagined
golden age in the pursuit of progress was a mod-
ern phenomenon possible only as of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries.43 The new
technologies and infrastructures of an industrial-
ized world allowed Muslim thinkers to imagine a
genuinely Pan-Islamic approach to reform. A Hui
scholar such as Tawād.u3 Pang, instead of taking it
on faith that a place called Egypt existed and that
it was part of the same Islamic world in which he
also lived, could actually board a steamship from
China to Egypt to study at the famed al- Azhar,
could actually board another steamship to perform
the hajj to Mecca, could actually meet Azharite
students from all corners of the Islamic world who
held the same beliefs and studied the same texts
as he did, and could actually see with his own eyes
that Muslim reformers in Egypt faced many of the
same challenges as their coreligionists elsewhere,
including China. It seemed that space was shrink-
ing as time moved inexorably forward. These new
realities enabled and encouraged Islamic reformist
thinkers to envision a renewal of the umma such
as had never occurred before. The irony is that
they did not adopt the temporal or spatial assump-
tions of the West but imagined progress precisely
as a return to an Islamic golden age. In so doing,
they made use of the technologies of modernity to
imagine alternatives to Western- dominated inter-
national order. Able to travel to the Middle East
more easily than before, the Hui participated ac-
tively in Islamic geopolitics beginning in the late
Ottoman period, and made those geopolitics their
own well into the twentieth century.
43. This is not to suggest that Islamic reform- 45. Abdul Rahman [Wang Haoran] to Sultan
ism qualiies as a “derivative discourse.” Abdülhamid II, c. 1899. I am grateful to Ulug
Kuzuoglu for bringing this document to my at-
44. Ben-Dor Benite, “Follow the White Camel,”
tention, and to Zvi Ben-Dor Benite for provid-
421.
ing context and interpretation.
• 34:1 • 2014
The Chinese Azharites, Islamic Geopolitics,
and the Reformist Inheritance
The near- simultaneous fall of the Ottoman and
Qing imperial systems marked the geopolitical
backdrop to the Chinese Azharites’ missions to
Egypt. The Hui had long understood their place
in the world with respect to these two systems.
Since the Ming Dynasty, they had gone to great
lengths to reconcile their faith with Confucian
principles and accommodate themselves to a Chi-
nese imperial cosmology geographically and con-
ceptually centered in Beijing — becoming in the
process “Chinese Muslims” rather than “Muslims
in China.”44 When the widespread violence of the
late Qing (including numerous Muslim uprisings)
disrupted that relationship, they could still look to
the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876 – 1909),
who had proclaimed himself Caliph, as their pa-
tron in spirit if not in fact.45 A half- century before
Tawād.u3 Pang’s time, Abdülhamid II mobilized Is-
lamic networks from North Africa to the Indian
Ocean to Central Asia in opposition to British and
French imperialism.46
Though this foreign policy was mostly a front
intended to play on European fears of an Islamic
bogeyman, the Hui responded enthusiastically to
Abdülhamid II’s call for jihad against the forces
of imperialism — an early sign of their eagerness
to (re)forge connections with the western Islamic
world. In the twilight of the Ottoman Empire, the
Beijing imam Abdul Rahman Wang Haoran (王
浩然), having made contact with Abdülhamid II’s
envoys in China, wrote a letter in Arabic to the sul-
tan describing the poor conditions of Muslims in
China, decrying the impact of European imperi-
alism on both the Ottomans and the Qing, urg-
ing him to keep the Hui in mind and if possible
send them material support, and ofering prayers
for the survival of the great Ottoman state.47 Wang
soon journeyed to Istanbul and was granted an au-
dience with the sultan. In China and Islam, Tawād.u3
Pang recounts:
God be praised, for the twentieth century arrived,
and with it came the reformist ulema [al- 3ulama
46. Feener, “New Networks and New Knowl-
edge,” 41–42.
47. Rahman to Abdülhamid II.
 John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 37

al- mujaddidūn]. Among them was the late Hajj world as a result of the simultaneous rise of secu-
Abdul Rahman Wan Hau Zan [Wang Haoran lar nationalist republicanism in both polities. The
in Arabic transliteration], who visited Egypt and emergence of the Republic of China seemed to be-
Turkey in 1905. He requested the Ottoman Caliph
token a secular antipathy toward Hui identity and
Abdülhamid II’s assistance in spreading Islam in
a threat to their hard-won modus vivendi with the
China. Abdülhamid II therefore sent a religious
Chinese imperial system. Then, after the dissolu-
and educational delegation to Beijing chaired by
Sheikh Ali Rida, accompanied by Sheikh Haiz. tion of the Ottoman state in 1923 and Ataturk’s ab-
This delegation remained in China for a total of olition of the Caliphate in 1924, the post- Ottoman
ive years.48 Middle East seemed a spiritual and geopoliti-
cal vacuum, occupied by Britain and France and
This short passage is notable for several reasons.
threatened by a Kemalist secular nationalism not
First, the fact that Tawād.u3 Pang considers Wang
unlike that of the Chinese republic. The fact that
Haoran to be a member of the “reformist ulema”
Tawād.u3 Pang and the Muslim Brotherhood dedi-
(al- 3ulamā’ al- mujaddidūn) — a phrase typically ap-
cated China and Islam to King Farouq I of Egypt
plied to Arab and Ottoman “Pan- Islamist” think-
signaled not only Chinese and Egyptian Muslims’
ers and activists—indicates that he believed Islamic
willingness to work with one of the few powerful
reformism was a truly transnational movement in
political actors remaining in the Middle East but
which the Hui were participating as equals.49 Sec-
more specifically the coincidence of both sides’
ond, Wang’s request for the sultan’s assistance in
search for a new center of gravity in the Islamic
spreading Islam in China relects the strained re-
world and the Middle East.50
lations between the Qing state and the Hui in the
Even though the Ottoman and Qing imperial
wake of the nineteenth- century Muslim rebellions
systems did not survive into the post–World War I
and signals the early stages of Hui awareness that
period, what did endure was the questions posed
they might be better of aligning with Muslim pow-
by secular and Islamic reformists alike: who are
ers in the Middle East — a truly monumental shift
we, how do we modernize while remaining true to
of mentality after centuries of assimilation and ac-
ourselves, how do we resist the power of colonial-
commodation, and one that would become more
ism, and what is to be the ideal form of political
pronounced after the founding of the Republic of
community in the wake of the immense changes
China in 1911. Third, the fact that Tawād.u3 Pang
of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
does not provide details about who Wang Haoran,
Among Islamic reformists, Rashid Rida took up
Sheikh Ali Rida, and Sheikh Haiz were — or even
this mantle through the forum of al-Manar, a jour-
their full names, for that matter — suggests that
nal published from 1898 until Rida’s death in 1935.
his Arabic- speaking audience was already familiar
Al-Manar far exceeded its primary function of pro-
with them. This is a relatively minor point, but it
viding Quranic commentary and advice on how to
still speaks to the transnationalist frame of mind
lead a proper existence as a Muslim. Building on
of Tawād.u3 Pang and of interwar Islamic reformism
the work of Rida’s mentor Abduh after the latter’s
generally.
early death in 1905, and enjoying a readership that
With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in
spanned the Islamic world, al-Manar undertook to
1918 – 23, the system of relations Wang had known
answer the most pressing questions of the age. By
was thrown into lux. In a little over a decade, the
its own description, its mission was to “discuss the
Hui were forced to reconceive their most funda-
philosophy of the [Islamic] religion and the afairs
mental relationships with both the Chinese state
of society and civilization.”51 Again, the Hui read
and the now- defunct Ottoman core of the Islamic

48. Pang, China and Islam, 69. 50. The literature on the early twentieth- 51. The epigraphic description of al- Manar’s
century “Caliphate debate” is too broad to purpose appeared for example on the title
49. Indeed, in Arabic there is no idiomatic way
summarize here, but standard coverage of it page of the irst issue of 1315AH/1898AD. A dis-
to express the “Pan-” in the English term Pan-
can be found in two works: Hourani, Arabic cussion of Rida’s thought and the aims of al-
Islamism — because it is not necessary to do
Thought in the Liberal Age, and Enayat, Modern Manar can be found in Hourani, Arabic Thought
so. The universal and transnational potentiali-
Islamic Political Thought. in the Liberal Age, 222–44.
ties of Islam are inherent in the word itself. I
am grateful to Angela Giordani for this insight.
38 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 34:1 • 2014

Rida’s al- Manar as well as other political journals
being published in Cairo.52 As al- Manar strove to
give shape to the post- Ottoman Islamic world and
a voice to its common interests, the Hui naturally
asked what their place in that world could and
should be. The unity of the Islamic umma, assumed
in theory by journals like al- Manar, was what the
Hui (and especially the Chinese Azharites) wanted
to realize in practice.
Although this unity would take the form of
the Hui’s cultural and dialogic inclusion in the Is-
lamic world rather than formal political alliance
with it, their desire nevertheless had political im-
plications. The increasingly tenuous relationship
between the Hui and the Chinese state, now trans-
formed into a republic, pushed the Hui to contem-
plate shifting their attention and allegiance, some-
how, toward the Middle East, despite the fact that
the Ottoman Empire was no more.53 This renewed
attention to the Middle East on the part of the Hui
has been referred to as both an “Arabization” of
Chinese Islam (in contrast with the preceding ive
to six centuries of accommodation to the Chinese
imperial cosmology) and as the formulation of a
“Muslim vision for the Chinese nation.”54 These
frameworks, however, do not fully recognize that
China was not the only point of reference for Hui.
Relatedly, they also do not fully recognize that the
Hui desire to revive intra- Asian and Islamic con-
nections coincided with a crisis of identity and
leadership in the Middle East itself in which the
very same revival of intra- Asian and Islamic con-
nections emerged as a possible solution. Tawād.u3
Pang’s China and Islam lent an unlikely voice to this
debate over Egypt’s future. In so doing, it posited a
role for the Hui in the newly deined Islamic world
as well as a concordance of political interests be-
tween China and the Middle East much like that
assumed by Wang Haoran a generation earlier.
Before turning to that story, we should note
that the inal key geopolitical development inform-
ing the Chinese Azharites’ journey to Cairo was
the rise of Japan’s empire in Asia.55 The extent to
which Hui communities were mobilized in China’s
war against Japan is a topic for a separate essay;
suice it to say that Tawād.u3 Pang feared Japanese
aggression not only because the Sino- Japanese
War had begun a year prior to his departure for
Cairo but also because the Japanese were actively
attempting to mobilize Islamic networks for their
own purposes — even funding a hajj delegation in
1938 separate from the republican- or Egyptian-
funded delegations.56 More broadly, the outbreak
of war in 1937 epitomized the shift in Japan’s sta-
tus in the colonial world. In the period from the
Meiji Restoration of 1868 to the Russo- Japanese
War of 1904 – 5, Japan had become a deep source
of optimism for colonial peoples, representing
the possibility that an “Eastern” nation could suc-
cessfully reform and strengthen itself to the point
of equaling or surpassing the Western powers.
By contrast, the advent of Japanese imperialism,
including but by no means limited to its attempt
to control Islamic networks and organizations,
posed a profound threat to that optimism. A sense
emerged that Muslims and Easterners needed to
cooperate to prevent another of their own from
deviating so rapidly from the correct path. Ac-
cordingly, they would also have to rethink the
principles on which reform was to be achieved.
From the beginning, some Hui collaborated with
the Japanese, while others participated actively in
China’s anti-Japanese resistance. In the latter case,
this participation often became a conduit for Hui
integration into the Chinese nation. Throughout
the 1930s and early 1940s, Yuehua and other Hui
journals ran headlines such as “The Hui Save the
Nation,” “Japanese Imperialists Attempt to Seduce
the Hui,” and “An Islamic Theory of War of Resis-
tance.”57 Although Tawād.u3 Pang’s feelings about

52. See Ben-Dor Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt,”
108.
53. For the Chinese side of this story, see Lei-
bold, Reconfiguring the Chinese Nation, and
Fitzgerald, Awakening China.
54. Ben-Dor Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt,” 105,
117 – 18; Mao, “Muslim Vision for the Chinese
Nation,” 375.
55. A sophisticated discussion of Japanese im-
perialism in Asia can be found in Tanaka, Ja-
pan’s Orient; see also Esenbel, “Japan’s Global
Claim to Asia.”
57. “Huizu jiuguo” (“The Hui Save the Na-
tion”), “Riben diguozhuyizhe gei huijiaominzu
de touhuo” (“Japanese Imperialists’ Attempt
to Seduce the Hui”), and “Huijiao de kang-
zhan lilun” (“An Islamic Theory of War of Re-
sistance”) in Wang et al., Huizu lishi baokan
wenxuan, 9, 52, 169.

56. See Mao, “Muslim Vision for the Chinese

Nation,” 373.

nationalism were complex, and although he rarely
discusses the war with Japan in China and Islam,
his feelings about Japan appear to have been rel-
atively unequivocal. In China and Islam, he notes
that an important purpose of fostering better Is-
lamic and Sino- Egyptian relations was to counter
Japanese inluence in Asia, and he laments that
because “the Japanese had just launched their co-
lonialist war,” the additional Chinese Muslims who
would otherwise have gone to Egypt were “scat-
tered across all corners of China.”58 In his 1950
Chinese-language memoir Nine Years in Egypt (Aiji
jiunian), he even claims that he and his colleagues
made their summer 1939 hajj to Mecca merely “as
a pretext to propagate China’s war of resistance”
against Japan to the competing Manchukuo-
funded hajj delegation (we should note, however,
that this latter statement was made in China at a
time when Tawād.u3 Pang was highlighting his na-
tionalism and downplaying his Islam in order to
accommodate to the new communist regime).59
While geopolitics and Chinese nationalism formed
a part of Tawād.u3 Pang’s ideological constellation,
they were by no means his sole motive. The next
two sections will explore aspects of Tawād.u3 Pang’s
transnationalism from the perspective of his expe-
rience in Egypt and his engagement with Islamic
reformist thought.
The Chinese Azharites, the Muslim Brotherhood,
and the Destiny of Egypt
Again, Cairo — with its multitude of political ac-
tors and burgeoning print culture — provided
the crucible in which the intellectual and geopo-
litical positions relected in Tawād.u3 Pang’s China
and Islam took shape. The evocative phrase “cri-
sis of orientation” has been used to describe the
heady atmosphere of 1930s Egypt. In the previous
decade, prominent intellectuals like Taha Hus-
sein and Muhammad Husayn Haykal had adopted
a secular and rationalist worldview, arguing that
Egypt’s past and future lay with the West and, in-
deed, that the country should be thought of as Eu-
ropean rather than Arab or Middle Eastern. Such
58. Pang, China and Islam, 98–99.
59. Pang, Aiji Jiunian, 31. Chinese: Jieyi xuanch-
uan woguo kangzhan de yiyi.
John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 39
arguments were prompted by Arab misfortunes
in World War I and under the League of Nations’
mandate system, and by a desire to steer the bur-
geoning nationalist movement in Egypt. The sec-
ular strains and deemphasis on Islam present in
such arguments, however, proved unsustainable.
By the 1930s, perhaps in an attempt to regain the
initiative from emerging grassroots movements
like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hussein and Haykal
themselves turned to studying Islamic subjects.
This turn was exempliied by their publication, re-
spectively, of 3Ala Hāmish al- Sīra (1933) and H . ayāt
Muh.ammad (1935), part of a larger trend in which
Egyptian intellectuals began producing works on
Islam known as Islamiyyat. In broad terms, this
turn to Islamic subjects overlapped with the fun-
damental question of whether Egypt belonged to
the West or the East, and whether its liberal experi-
ment would remain viable.60
Of course, t he not ion of a turn, of a
pendulum- like swing from one end of the ideo-
logical spectrum to the other, is a bit of a misno-
mer. For most of the interwar period, “secular
nationalism” and “Islamic thought” did not rep-
resent mutually exclusive ideological poles but
rather alternative overlapping discursive modes
from which leaders and thinkers could draw se-
lectively and that many viewed as consonant. One
individual who embodied this luidity was Muhib
al-Din al-Khatib, founder and editor of the weekly
al- Fath. Published by the Salai Publishing House
and Bookstore in Cairo (Dār al- mat. ba3a al-salaiyya
wa maktabiha), this periodical self-identiied as an
“Islamic weekly” (s.ah.īfa islāmiyya usbu3iyya) but also
regularly discussed Arab and Egyptian nationalist
themes in its wide-ranging coverage of domestic,
international, and religious afairs. Al- Fath is sig-
nificant not only because it was a microcosm of
interwar Egyptian and Islamic politics from the
Middle East that the Hui read and translated, but
also because it was the organ that issued the irst
book by a Chinese Azharite author. Ma Jian (馬堅),
who used the Arabic name Muhammad Makīn, ar-
rived in Egypt with the irst Chinese Azharite del-
60. The “crisis of orientation” has generated a James P. Jankowski, in the book Redeining the
sizable scholarly debate. In addition to Nadav Egyptian Nation.
Safran and Charles D. Smith, Israel Gershoni
has devoted considerable attention to this
question in “Egyptian Liberalism” and, with
40 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
egation in 1931. His Overview of the History of Islam
in China and Conditions of Muslims Therein was pub-
lished by al- Fath’s Salai Publishing House in 1934.
Although it was not as widely received as Tawād.u3
Pang’s China and Islam, it represented the begin-
ning of a trend of Chinese Azharite participation
in Egyptian Islamic politics well beyond the walls
of al-Azhar.61
Thus, the foundation had already been laid
for Tawād.u3 Pang to identify with conditions in
Egypt and recognize the challenges of Egypt’s
Muslims as the same as those for China’s Muslims.
That trend reached its apogee in the relationship
between the Chinese Azharites and the Egyptian
Muslim Brotherhood, whose rise must be under-
stood in terms of the “crisis of orientation.” The
Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the Chi-
nese Azharites represented a clear reaction to the
intellectuals who earlier had claimed that Egypt
belonged to the West rather than the East. It also
revealed their aspiration to increase their promi-
nence in the Islamic world after the fall of the
Ottoman Caliphate. Formally eschewing politi-
cal ambitions in favor of social services and pros-
elytizing, the Muslim Brotherhood in fact had a
deeply political mission, opposing both the British
presence in Egypt and the perceived “un-Islamic”
direction in which Egyptian society was mov-
ing under the inluence of Europe, Turkey, and
Egypt’s own elites.62 The Brotherhood also had
considerable contact with Egypt’s growing nation-
alist movement.63 The aspiration for a new type of
Islamic politics coalesced in the person of Hassan
al-Banna, whose father was a kuttab instructor and
an imam trained at al-Azhar in the time of Abduh.
As “General Guide” of the Muslim Brotherhood,
al- Banna rejected al- Azhar’s formalistic, scholarly
approach, seeking reform instead through grass-
roots activism.
By 1945, the Brotherhood had by some ac-
counts nearly 2 million members and was growing
increasingly global in outlook, beginning to think
61. See Makin, Naz. ra jāmi 3a, and Ben- Dor in the years prior to the 1952 coup and their
Benite, “Nine Years in Egypt,” 107. support for such a coup. See Mitchell, Society
of the Muslim Brothers.
62. See Enayat, Modern Islamic Political
Thought, and Mitchell, Society of the Muslim 64. Mitchell gives the translation, “Section for
Brothers, 4. Liaison with the Islamic World.” My alternative
rendering of the Arabic qism al-ittis.āl bi-l-3ālam
63. Richard Mitchell discusses at length the
al-islāmı̄, “Islamic World Outreach Division,” is
Brotherhood’s contacts with the Free Oficers
• 34:1 • 2014
not only in terms of Egypt but in terms of the en-
tire umma. It had also established its own press,
through which it disseminated a collection of writ-
ings (rasā’il), some of which were propaganda,
but others of which were responses to particular
world events. In the early 1940s, the Brotherhood’s
Islamic World Outreach Division (Qism al- ittis. āl
bi- l- 3ālam al- islāmi),64 with the direct approval and
interest of al- Banna, tasked Tawād.u3 Pang with
composing China and Islam, the irst publication
in what was to be a series of extended essays on
the state of the umma. Published in May 1945 just
as victory in World War II was being declared in
Europe, the report contained a passionate fore-
word penned by al- Banna himself. Although
the Brotherhood did not link the publication of
Tawād.u3 Pang’s book directly to the ending of the
war, it is clear that they were keenly aware of the
opportunities and discontents of this particular
historical juncture. As the United Nations Confer-
ence on International Organization of April– June
1945 convened in San Francisco, al-Banna wrote in
the Brotherhood’s biweekly al- Ikhwan al- Muslimun
(The Muslim Brotherhood):
Several thousand leaders of peoples and nations
have now gathered to deliberate the future of hu-
manity and to seek out the proper instruments for
securing peace, righteousness, human welfare,
and stability. The eyes and ears of the entire world
now rest on these few thousand delegates, eagerly
watching and waiting for the morning of tranquil-
ity, the good tidings of a lasting peace, and the
light of justice and equitability shining out clear
as the dawn.
The [Egyptian and Arab] delegates . . . an-
nounced that they wanted all human civilizations
and all the world’s traditional bases of law to be
represented in the new International Court of Jus-
tice. Foremost among these would be the civiliza-
tion and law [sharia] of Islam, which the delegates
have decreed to be a sound and suicient legal
system that can represent a viable source for in-
ternational lawmaking. Our delegates performed
meant to relect my argument that this organ’s
mandate was positive and political rather than
perfunctory. I believe this translation also re-
lects Mitchell’s discussion of the division’s ob-
jectives. See ibid., 172–73.
 John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 41

well presenting their suggestions — and when I
say “our delegates,” I do not mean the delegates
of Egypt alone but rather all those noble and es-
teemed representatives of the Arab and Islamic
peoples who approved the suggestion of the Egyp-
tian delegation and all agreed to support and ad-
vocate for it.
This is an opportunity for us as Arabs and
Egyptians to say to the world that we are not, as
many have thought, backward or barbarous sav-
ages, but rather from times of old — well before
Europe opened its eyes to the light or America was
discovered by those well-known explorers — have
lived according to a law [sharia] lofty in both
principle and intent, fertile and plentiful, handed
down age upon age, generation upon generation,
fulilling the needs of nations and peoples. This
is also an opportunity for the world to hear the
voice that has long gone unheard, and to beneit
from the workings of God’s mercy by which we
Easterners irst distinguished ourselves. Our land
is that of the rising sun, a fount of inspiration and
enlightenment and divine revelation, birthplace
of messengers and prophets, home of the saintly
and the righteous, school of holy texts learned by
pious souls that they might spread their message
throughout the land and that in it the poor and
wretched might take comfort.65
Intentions are diicult to judge: it is impossible to
say based on this article alone whether al- Banna
was simply playing to his audience or whether he
sincerely believed that sharia would become a
basis for international law, which it subsequently
did only in the most nominal sense, through the
court’s nods to the role of “international custom,
as evidence of a general practice accepted as law”
and “the general principles of law recognized by
civilized nations” (with no further deinitions pro-
vided).66 In addition to al-Banna’s article, the April
1945 issue of Muhib al- Din al-Khatib’s al- Fath also
optimistically took note of the Arab delegations’
suggestion, voiced in a memorandum submitted
by the Egyptian delegation, that sharia be applied
in the International Court of Justice.67 What mat-
ters most in this excerpt, however, is the sense it
conveys about the signiicance of its historical mo-
ment. After a second world war that had claimed
tens of millions of lives, this was a time when the
legacy of Western Enlightenment appeared more
discredited than ever, when imperialism appeared
on its last legs, when Muslims and Islamic princi-
ples appeared poised to play a civilizing role in in-
ternational afairs, when the message of the Broth-
erhood could be elevated and spread to all corners
of the globe, and when the destiny of Egypt, the
Arabs, and Islam seemed clearly bound to that of
the East.
It is not diicult to grasp how the publica-
tion of Tawād.u3 Pang’s China and Islam could it
into this vision. In its 31 May 1945 issue, al- Ikhwan
al- Muslimun ran an advertisement for China and
Islam, noting that the author was both the head of
the Chinese delegations at al-Azhar and a member
of the Brotherhood’s Islamic World Outreach Divi-
sion.68 This fact alone was signiicant, given the ri-
valry that existed between the Brotherhood and al-
Azhar. Tawād.u3 Pang’s work evidently represented
something on which both institutions could agree.
The advertisement also highlighted the foreword
by al- Banna, conferring tremendous legitimacy
and import on the book. Together, al- Banna’s
foreword and Tawād.u3 Pang’s book signiied the
Brotherhood’s ambition to extend its message and
work to the entire global umma by irst staking its
claim on the umma’s farthest- lung members: the
Chinese Hui. Tawād.u3 Pang’s book encompassed
several related but not entirely overlapping objec-
tives: to introduce Chinese and Hui history to an
Arabic- speaking audience; to raise the status of the
Hui within China and in the umma; to increase the
inluence of the Muslim Brotherhood in the Mid-
dle East and the world; to foster positive bilateral
relations between China and Egypt, particularly
to the extent that would further Muslim interests;
to address the challenges of modernization for
China, for the Hui, and for Muslims and Eastern-

65. al-Banna, “Islamic Civilization and Law,” 3.
66. The Statute of the International Court of
Justice adopted at the United Nations Confer-
ence on International Organization, chap. 2,
“Competence of the Court,” 38, stipulates that
the court’s work will draw upon the “general
principles of law recognized by civilized na-
tions” (emphasis mine) as well as the “teach-
ings of the most highly qualiied publicists of
the various nations.”
67. al-Fath, “Islamic Shari’a among Legal Frame-
works to Be Represented in International Court
of Justice” (“Al-sharı̄ 3a al-islāmiyya d.imn al-nuz.
um al-tashrı̄ 3iyya al-mumathala fı̄ mah.kamat
al-3adl al- duwaliyya”), Jumadi al-Awwal 1364/
April 1945, 12.
68. Al- Ikhwan al- Muslimun, “Recently Pub-
lished: China and Islam by Muhammad Tawād.u3”
(“Zahara qarı̄ban: Al-s.ı̄n wa-l-islām; ta’lı̄f: Mu-
hammad Tawād.u3”), 31 May 1945, 11.
42 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
ers in general; and to carry out a work of ijtihad
that would enrich the collective life of the umma
and echo the golden age of Islam.
Tawād.u3 Pang, in his eforts to speak for both
the interests of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood
and for those of the Hui, evinced a willingness to
work within the existing political systems of both
countries — a characteristic of the Brotherhood
as a whole in this period. This pragmatic stance,
however, was sufused with the foregone conclu-
sion that the destinies of Egypt, Islam, and the
East were inescapably intertwined. Aware of the
need to identify powerful patrons who could help
realize and safeguard such a future, Tawād.u3 Pang
and the Brotherhood included in the front pages
of China and Islam a digniied portrait of Chiang
Kai- shek, and dedicated the book to King Farouq
I, a portion of which read as follows:
To H is Majest ic H ighnes s t he Great K ing
Farouq I:
My Liege: As King of Egypt and the Egyptians
you are an exalted igure in the hearts of Eastern-
ers and Muslims. May you remain ever mindful
to the rise of the East and of Islam, and to the
global Umma of the Quran ever a guardian and
protector.
Muhammad Tawād.u3
Head of the Chinese Delegation and
Member of the Islamic World Outreach
Division69
Thus the Brotherhood, through Tawād.u3 Pang,
made a direct appeal to the Egyptian crown to take
up the mantle that Ataturk had forsaken in abol-
ishing the Caliphate in 1924. It is unclear whether
Farouq ever saw the book, but he did show clear
interest in the Hui. Perhaps he himself had aspira-
tions to ill the shoes left vacant by the former Ot-
toman Sultanate and Caliphate. As Tawād.u3 Pang
reports in his chapter on Sino-Egyptian relations:
In 1936, when the distinguished Professor Sheikh
Abdurrahim Ma Songting inquired with His Maj-
esty, the great Islamic King Farouq I, regarding
the Chinese Muslims, he requested from His Maj-
esty that a new delegation be sent to the Noble
Azhar. His Majesty obliged, accepting a new
69. Pang, China and Islam, dedication page.
70. Ibid., 98.
• 34:1 • 2014
delegation of young Chinese Muslims inanced
through his own personal funds, and though this
delegation numbered twenty students, the king
still arranged for each of them to receive an ad-
ditional stipend of three Egyptian pounds per
month.70
Farouq I also provided the Hui with fund-
ing to be used in China, in return for which they
named the library at the Chengda Islamic School
after Farouq’s father, King Fu’ad I, in 1936.71 This
level of interest suggests that Farouq I really was at-
tempting to enhance Egypt’s proile in the Islamic
world by mobilizing far- flung Muslim networks,
as Sultan Abdülhamid II had done before him.
Furthermore, Tawād.u3 Pang states that once the
Sino- Japanese War began in 1937, another aim of
fostering Sino-Egyptian relations through Muslim
networks was to help counter Japanese inluence in
Asia.72 Again, the imperatives of politics were inter-
twined with those of religion, both of which built
toward the goal of reviving an ideal Islamic com-
munity and ensuring it was protected. But what
exactly was at stake in that project, and how was it
articulated? We will now explore the principles on
which Tawād.u3 Pang and the Muslim Brotherhood
believed a re- Oriented Islamic umma and global
East would turn.
The Chinese Azharites, Islamic Conceptual Idiom,
and Globalizing Islamic Reform
Having journeyed to Egypt, and having made deep
connections with both al- Azhar and the Muslim
Brotherhood, Tawād.u3 Pang placed himself at the
center of several long- standing interrelated de-
bates concerning the nature of the umma, the chal-
lenge of modernization, and the importance of ijti-
had. He thereby formed the unlikeliest of bridges
in the competition between the bottom- up po-
litical activism of al- Banna’s Muslim Brotherhood
and the more formal approach of al- Azhar’s classi-
cal scholarship. In the context of Egyptian politics,
he also added an unlikely voice in support of the
argument that Egypt — yearning for independence
from the British — was not in fact a unique, self-
contained nation belonging to the West, as many
Egyptian intellectuals had argued, but rather a
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.

crucial member of the overlapping transnational
communities of the Arab world, the Islamic umma,
and the global East.
As discussed above, the Brotherhood’s main
purpose in cultivating a relationship with the Hui
was to position itself as a leading force in the new
global umma. Hassan al- Banna’s language in his
foreword to China and Islam speaks to this aspira-
tion. While we should not automatically take al-
Banna at his word — as the more immediate mo-
tives of steering Egyptian politics and opposing
the British often took precedence — it nevertheless
remains diicult to explain the robustness of the
Muslim Brotherhood’s relationship with the Chi-
nese Azharites in the absence of such an aspiration
to lead the umma and shift the balance of global
politics back to the East. In the irst section of al-
Banna’s foreword to China and Islam, he addresses
the meaning of the “community of Islam” ( jāmi 3at
al-islām):
[A]ll that Islam commands of people exists merely
to strengthen the communal bonds between Mus-
lims and to strengthen forms of human under-
standing within them. No matter how far- lung
their nations, distant their dwellings, or diferent
their races or ethnicities, all Muslims innately feel
as though they are a single community [umma], a
single people [sha 3b], whose unity is that of Islamic
doctrine [3aqīdah]. It has been instilled in their
hearts that neither natural obstacles, nor geo-
graphical borders, nor political considerations or
personal quarrels, can ever come between them,
for God the Blessed and Sublime willed it so — a
single umma — with His words: “Behold! This, your
umma, is a single umma, and I am your Lord, thus
to Me alone shall you pray.”73
In other words, al- Banna’s umma would be
a truly global one. With the phrase “no matter
how far- lung their nations” (mahmā tabā 3adat awt.
ānuhum), al- Banna sought to redeine the umma
not as coterminous with the antique Dar al-Islam,
which limited the umma geographically to those
territories falling under Muslim rule, but rather
as coterminous with the entire community of be-
73. Hassan al-Banna, “Communities,” in Pang, 75. al- Banna, “Communities,” in Pang, China
China and Islam, vi–vii. and Islam, vii.
74. Quoted in al- Banna, “Communities,” in
Pang, China and Islam, vi.
John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 43
lievers, wherever they may be. When writing the
foreword to a book about China, it was especially
necessary for al-Banna to privilege the most inclu-
sive principles of the Islamic tradition, given that
China had never come under Islamic rule and was
never part of Dar al-Islam.74 Al-Banna goes to great
lengths to emphasize Islam’s inclusivity, which
meant emphasizing the contingency and ultimate
unimportance of political borders and distinc-
tions of identity. It is in this context that he quotes
Quran 49:13, Surat al-Hujurat, in the opening para-
graph of his foreword: “O Mankind! We created
you man and woman and made you into tribes and
nations that you may know one another, and not
that you may despise one another. Verily the most
honorable among you is the most righteous in
the sight of God.”75 Accordingly, al- Banna’s umma
would be uniied not so much in terms of formal
institutional arrangements as it would be in terms
of substantive principles — that is, the most basic
tenets of Islamic doctrine upon which all believ-
ers theoretically agreed. Underlying this substan-
tive inclusivity was the claim that 3aqīdah, the basic
doctrines of Islam shared across all sects — such
as the ininite oneness of God and acceptance of
Muhammad as His Prophet — formed a suicient
unifying principle to maintain the cohesiveness
of this umma. Al- Banna’s use of the term sha 3b to
describe the entire “Muslim people,” furthermore,
reveals his attempt to compete with the various
groups of secular anticolonial nationalists operat-
ing in Egypt. The sha 3b did not have to refer to only
a materially bounded national unit but could also
refer to a transnational spiritual unit. Al- Banna’s
efort to downplay the relevance of geographical
borders and local political factors demonstrates
his desire to claim a type of jurisdiction over all
the world’s Muslims, even those living as far away
as China. At the same time, however, this claim did
not directly contest that made by the governments
under which those Muslims lived. Instead, change
would take place at the level of everyday life, just as
al- Banna had accomplished in the Nile Delta and
Ismā3 īliyya. Conditions would be fostered in which
44 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Muslims could learn the proper ways of their
faith and freely interact with their coreligionists
throughout the umma, and as the thinking went,
the world would be a better place.
Building on these themes, the next section of
al- Banna’s foreword was titled “The Bonds of the
East.” Positing the existence of the “East” allowed
al- Banna a framework in which he could claim to
speak not only for the entire Muslim world but
also for any society that could claim descent from
an ancient Asian civilization that had since fallen
under European inluence:
People certainly feel many sorts of ties; for in-
stance, the idea of the bond of the East exists
among its children. Now I do not think that this
bond rests on something deep within them or
reaches the profoundest layers of their thoughts
and feelings. I think it is a notion forged in them by
the arrogance of the West: its pride in its material
power, its science, its knowledge, its lorescence —
all the efects that have befallen it thanks to the
modern natural sciences. It would only be fair to
mention that the East too has its cosmopolitan-
ism, its civilization, its philosophy, its spiritual-
ity, its books, its prophets and saints, and that it
is still a beacon of science, knowledge, thought,
and belief, and indeed that the world turns not on
physical material alone, nor is ruled solely by ire
and steel. Behind all that is a world of hearts and
minds, sympathies and sentiments.76
Positing the existence of a global East — one
as equally accomplished and equally cosmopoli-
tan as the West — provided al- Banna another
angle from which to appeal to Muslims (and non-
Muslims) beyond the borders of Egypt. Even if
they were not Arab or Muslim, literally millions of
people in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia could
sympathize with such an evocation of cultural
uniqueness and collective memory, with such an
expression of resentment toward Western arro-
gance, and with such a sense of injustice that those
who had contributed to the development of civili-
zation could now be deemed backward and sub-
jected to foreign rule. They could also therefore
sympathize with the alternative narrative of world
76. al-Banna, “Communities,” in Pang, China
and Islam, vii.
77. Pang, China and Islam, xvi.
• 34:1 • 2014
history that al- Banna was ofering: one centered
on a critique of the West, in which the most im-
portant consequence of European expansion was
the interruption of older patterns of intra-Eastern
interaction, and in which scientific knowledge
originally developed outside the West was unjustly
employed by the West as an instrument of empire.
Tawād.u3 Pang’s introduction to China and
Islam reveals his debts to Abduh, Rida, and al-
Banna, while also showing some of the ways in
which he measured Islamic reformist thought
against Chinese (Han and Muslim) reference
points. He introduced the book, for example, with
a familiar assessment of the causes of the rise and
fall of civilizations: “Countries grow powerful or
weak, progress or fall behind, according to the
events and circumstances that befall them. The
Islamic countries experienced golden ages that
radiated from the pages in history, followed by
decline and stagnation that we hope will come to
pass, that Islam and Muslims may begin a new age
in which their dignity will be raised, their interests
elevated, and their power increased among the
nations of the world.”77 This passage echoes Ibn
Khaldun and other classical scholars who wrote
on Arab and Islamic civilization. At the same
time, it also echoes the opening lines of the Ro-
mance of the Three Kingdoms: “It is a general truth
of this world that that which is divided will unite,
and that which is united will as surely divide.”78 By
locating such commonalities, Tawād.u3 Pang was
rendering present conditions in Egypt and China
commensurable by locating compatibilities in the
Chinese and Islamic classical traditions. Tawād.u3
Pang’s assessment of the challenges facing Muslim
societies strongly echoes Abduh’s thought in terms
of its emphasis on ijtihad, its obsession with “back-
wardness,” and its ambivalent stance toward the
West as both model and competitor. At the same
time, it embraces the themes of brotherhood and
return to an Islamic golden age that have multi-
ple sources, including both Abduh and al- Banna.
Tawād.u3 Pang’s clearest interpretation of the plight
and the mission of Muslims comes in the introduc-
tion to China and Islam:
78. Chinese: 話說天下大勢，分久必合，合久必
分. This insight originated in a spring 2012 semi-
nar with Zvi Ben-Dor Benite.

What has happened to the Muslims in China is
the same as what has happened to their broth-
ers in all countries. It is imperative for reform-
ers and modernizers wishing to remedy this and
protect their interests to undertake research and
study before they seek to describe and prescribe.
I therefore wrote this book as a description of the
conditions of Muslims in China, that they might
know themselves and their brothers throughout
the world, that they might assess their ills and
prescribe a treatment, that they might progress
with the noble caravan of life and stand with
their Muslim brethren as one hand in the world,
in accordance with His word: “Cling fast, ye one
and all, and do not let go the mighty cord [i.e.,
Quran/covenant] of God.”79
What we seek is a return to the golden age
[al- 3as. r al- dhahabī] of Islam and Muslims. We
will achieve this only through a return to reason
[ijtihad] and invention [istinbāt. ], for these are
the basis of success, the pillar of progress [al-
taqaddum], the great mover of the world. As for
blind imitation [taqlīd], it is the bringer of weak-
ness, the harbinger of stagnation, the irst step on
the path toward perdition and demise.80
Thus Tawād.u3 Pang conirmed his identiication
with Egypt, equating the plight of Muslims there
to that of Muslims in China. He also achieved a
synthesis between diverging strands of Islamic
thought embodied in the Brotherhood and al-
Azhar. Speciically, he echoed al- Banna in airm-
ing that all the world’s Muslims are bound by the
unity of doctrine (whose ultimate source is the
Quran) and by the commonality of modern experi-
ence (that is, the impact of colonialism, the specter
of “backwardness,” and the challenge of progress
and modernization), and he echoed Abduh in his
conviction that protecting Islamic and intra-Asian
relations, and restoring the practice of ijtihad to its
rightful societal role, represented the soundest re-
sponse to these issues.
The most interesting aspect of Tawād.u3 Pang’s
statement is that he leaves it ambiguous whether
this “golden age of Islam and Muslims” refers to
the generation of the Prophet Muhammad and his
ِ ‫ٱع َت‬
79. From Quran 3:103, Al Imran. Arabic: ‫ص ُم وا‬ ْ ‫َو‬
‫ج ْي عً َو َل َت َف ِر ُق وا‬
ِ َ ‫ب ْب ِل اه‬.
َ ِ community of the elders, the salaf, was what
the umma ought to be. It remained so through-
80. Pang, China and Islam, xvi. This was largely
out the irst centuries, for when Abduh talks of
a debt to Abduh and Rida. As Hourani says,
the salaf, he does not use the term in a tech-
“for Abduh [the ideal society] is also a society
John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 45
Companions or to the lourishing of the Abbasid
Caliphate (the two likeliest candidates in a typi-
cal invocation of the golden age). The former, of
course, established the ideal bases of a Muslim so-
ciety, while the latter cultivated a vast system of in-
teraction with points east, allowing most of Eurasia
to be dominated by Muslim networks operating
luidly across the borders of several empires and
states. Tawād.u3 Pang is in fact best served by the
ambiguity. First of all, both options would allow
the Hui to be included in a global umma: the irst
by dictating that Muslims everywhere, “no matter
how far- lung their nations,” should adhere to the
same basic principles, and are therefore united in
a single community; the second by implying that
an ideal world is one in which Muslims in China
and Muslims in the Middle East are directly con-
nected by networks of spiritual, scholarly, and com-
mercial exchange. Ultimately, however, what mat-
ters most is not when this golden age occurred but
what principles it embodied. Tawād.u3 Pang implies
that during this golden age, the entire Muslim
community operated according to the principles
of ijtihad and that this was a fundamental source
of their strength. The other source of strength was
that all Muslims were connected as “brothers,” no
matter their respective places of origin. European
imperialism and national consolidation were the
main culprits for Muslim and Eastern “weakness”
and “stagnation” in more recent times, for they
broke these previous connections and encouraged
the abandonment of these sound principles. In
other words, in the golden age, not only had the
West not yet disrupted Muslim- dominated intra-
Asian networks, but empires and nation- states in
general had not yet gained the ability to regulate
identities in the way that the Chinese republic was
attempting to regulate the identity of the Hui. In
such a golden age, in other words, the Hui could
be (and were, according to Tawād.u3 Pang) full and
equal participants in the Chinese empire and full
and equal participants in the Islamic umma, with-
out contradiction.
which once existed. . . . The early umma, the nical sense to mean the first generation of
friends and disciples of the Prophet; he uses it
more generally to refer to the central tradition
of Sunni Islam in its period of development.”
Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 149.
46 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Finally, something must be said about the
philosophy of time evident in Tawād.u3 Pang’s
thought. It is tempting to note the apparent incon-
gruity of his claim that he wanted both “progress”
(al- taqaddum), through the application of ijtihad
and the rejection of taqlīd, and also a “return to
the golden age of Islam and Muslims.” Indeed,
even Abduh and Rida had not fully resolved this
tension; in any case, standard scholarly treatments
tend to overstate the Western impact on Islamic re-
formist thought, assuming that Abduh and Rida’s
interaction with the ideas of Rousseau, Comte,
Spencer, and Renan meant that they were inescap-
ably progressivist. How could one achieve progress
by seeking to preserve the past?
For Tawād.u3 Pang, however, there was no con-
tradiction. The golden age of the umma was both
a historical moment that had once existed and a
transhistorical ideal that could be realized again.
Modernization alone — whether it drew upon West-
ern inspirations or not — would be no more than a
means by which to achieve this ideal, not an end in
itself. This was neither a rigidly progressivist tem-
porality like that of the post- Enlightenment West
nor an eruptive, eventful temporality like that
of certain anticolonial movements.81 In contrast,
Tawād.u3 Pang’s thought exhibited a relational tem-
porality that read time in terms of movement to-
ward or away from an ideal state represented by
the golden age. A contradiction only exists, then,
if one stays within the conceptual boundaries dic-
tated by Enlightenment epistemological assump-
tions that required history to move forward in a lin-
ear fashion. In reality, it was disillusionment with
the Enlightenment’s linear deinition of progress
that encouraged the search for alternative visions
of identity, transnational community, and geopo-
litical order. Tawād.u3 Pang’s relational temporality,
however, should be thought of not as an alternative
but as a synthesis. It was neither staunchly positiv-
ist like the Enlightenment tradition nor staunchly
revivalist like certain other branches of modern
Islamic thought. Rather, it mounted a profound
critique of the modern world by arguing that pre-
serving Islamic and intra-Asian relations could be
81. On progressivist temporalities in Europe,
see especially the essays “The Temporaliza-
tion of Utopia” and “Progress and Decline” in
• 34:1 • 2014
a means of achieving social progress, and by argu-
ing that the past could be a model for the future in
pursuit of that end.
Through China and Islam, Tawād.u3 Pang
voiced his conviction that his fellow Muslims
should all work to cultivate a world of lourishing
intra- Asian exchange that he believed would em-
power the Hui and be more durable and more de-
sirable than a world of nation- states. In hindsight,
it is clear that he did not entirely anticipate the mo-
mentum decolonization would lend to the nation-
state principle, nor did he imagine how close to
home the consequences would hit.
From Umma to Third World: The Fate of Islamic
Civilizational Discourse to Bandung
Tawād.u3 Pang’s China and Islam stands out as a
unique and important work on several levels. First,
it attempted to place the Hui irmly in Islamic his-
tory, and in doing so saw itself as participating in
a vibrant Islamic tradition of exchange I call “tex-
tual transnationalism.” Second, it responded to
pressing geopolitical concerns maintained by the
Hui since the late Ottoman period, concerns that
had been made more acute by secular nationalist
republicanism and Japanese imperialism. Third, it
relected Tawād.u3 Pang’s identiication with Egypt,
his participation in the Egyptian milieu, and his
absorption of multiple genealogies of Islamic
thought from al- Azhar and the Muslim Brother-
hood. Fourth, it evinced a capacity for intellectual
synthesis, mounting an argument that preserving
systems of intra-Asian exchange such as those seen
in Islam’s golden age was compatible with mod-
ern notions of progress. In these four elements of
Tawād.u3 Pang’s work, we can begin to grasp the
vital importance of Islamic reformism to the Chi-
nese Azharites as well as the ways in which they
translated that body of thought.
As the process of decolonization gained mo-
mentum, and as national independence became
the main goal of formerly colonized societies, it
became diicult to oppose colonialism from any
perspective other than a national, secular one.
In other words, it became diicult to be Muham-
Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History; on
eruptive temporality, see especially the intro-
duction and chap. 1 of Manjapra, M. N. Roy.
 John T. Chen • Re-Orientation 47

mad Tawād.u3 Pang: to critique modernity and co-
lonialism instead by arguing for the preservation
of intra- Asian relations as they had existed in the
past. All of a sudden, such arguments seemed ut-
terly anachronistic. Overnight, the nation- state
had become the only viable form of political real-
ization for newly independent peoples. Neverthe-
less, the leaders of newly independent nations did
not entirely do away with visions of transnational
community such as Tawād.u3 Pang’s; rather, more
subtly, such visions were co- opted by national
leaders and arguably came to play a formative
role in the politics and rhetoric of the Afro- Asian
movement. After all, as American author Richard
Wright commented after attending the Bandung
Conference, while he expected Afro- Asianism to
be an alliance of secular, “colored” nation- states,
what he in fact found all around him was Islam.82
For such reasons, Tawād.u3 Pang’s desire for re-
Orientation also merits discussion in terms of the
genealogy of transnational politics and “civiliza-
tional” discourse in which it participated.
With respect to transnational politics, di-
rect connections do exist between the Chinese
Azharites and the Afro- Asian movement. Most
important, the Chinese Islamic Association—
founded in 1952 by Tawād.u3 Pang, Ma Jian, and
several colleagues—sent Da Pusheng, one of the
famous “Four Imams” active since the days of the
1911 Revolution, to accompany Zhou Enlai’s delega-
tion to the irst Afro-Asian Conference at Bandung
in April 1955.83 This is certainly not to suggest that
the Hui were the primary constituency inluenc-
ing Chinese foreign policy at the Bandung; what
is clear, however, is that Zhou Enlai realized that it
would be crucial to make an overture to the Arab
states, particularly Egypt, and that from the per-
spective of foreign policy, co- opting connections
already forged by the Chinese Azharites would be
a reliable way to accomplish this. Though it is a
separate topic, the geopolitical payof was signii-
cant for China in terms of relationships formed
with Egypt, the Palestinian movement, and other
Arab actors.84
With respect to civilizational discourse, the
main features of this discourse were an invocation
of respect for the “ancient civilizations” of the non-
European world, a call to overthrow colonialism,
and an exhortation to Asian and African nations
to cooperate for purposes of modernization and
development. We typically see this rhetoric as orig-
inating in the Afro- Asian and Third World move-
ments.85 As we have seen, however, this rhetoric
was in fact articulated earlier — with striking simi-
larities — by Islamic reformists generally and by
Tawād.u3 Pang speciically during the interwar pe-
riod. At Bandung, nationalist leaders conveyed a
desire for alternatives similar to that voiced earlier
by Abduh, Rida, al-Banna, and Tawād.u3 Pang; how-
ever, they did so in a way that retreated from the
more expansive visions of their predecessors. For
example, addressing Bandung’s plenary session on
19 April, Zhou Enlai stated: “The peoples of Asia
and Africa created brilliant ancient civilizations
and made tremendous contributions to mankind.
But, ever since modern times most of the countries
of Asia and Africa in varying degrees have been
subjected to colonial plunder and oppression, and
have thus been forced to remain in a stagnant
state of poverty and backwardness. Our voices
have been suppressed, our aspirations shattered,
and our destiny placed in the hands of others.”86
In contrast to Tawād.u3 Pang’s call to revive intra-
Asian connections in an Islamic framework, Zhou
Enlai’s vision — despite rhetorical similarities —
presupposed that all intra- Asian relations would
be mediated by the nation- state. For Tawād.u3 Pang,
invoking the achievements of the past had been
part of a politics of emancipation. For Zhou Enlai,
the same rhetoric became part of the geopolitics
of control, as he played upon the sentiments of an
audience of formerly colonized peoples.
Just as these Third World leaders adopted
the nation- state as the ideal form for ordering po-

82. See Wright, Color Curtain, 119–22.
83. Though sometimes asserted, it appears Ma
Jian did not interpret for Gamal Abdel Nasser
and Zhou Enlai at Bandung. See, e.g., Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, Zhongguo daibiaotuan, 38,
and Li, Xuezhe de zhuiqiu, 1–7, 116–82.
84. On Sino-Egyptian relations, see Behbehani,
China’s Foreign Policy; Nasser Eddine, Arab-Chi-
nese Relations; and Li, Xuezhe de zhuiqiu, 3–4.
85. See Lee, Making a World after Empire, and
Chakrabarty, “Legacies of Bandung.” Chakra-
barty has referred to this civilizational rheto-
ric as the “dialogic” side of Third World cultural
politics (while modernist rhetoric is the “peda-
gogic” side).
86. Enlai, “Premier Chou En-lai’s Main Speech.”
48 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
litical and social life, they also adopted the posi-
tivist, progressivist temporality that informed the
idea of the nation. Like Zhou Enlai’s, Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s rhetoric also bears striking resemblance
to his Islamic reformist predecessors in Egypt. As
Nasser sought to consolidate his newfound power,
certain rhetorical aspects of Islamic reformism be-
came an efective tool for establishing legitimacy.
Thus in his Philosophy of the Revolution (1953) Nasser
proclaimed:
European society had passed through the stages
of its evolution in an orderly manner. It crossed
the bridge between the Renaissance at the end of
the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century step
by step. The stages of this evolution systematically
succeeded one another. In our case everything
was sudden. We lived behind an iron curtain
which suddenly collapsed. We were cut of from
the world; we renounced its life especially after
trade with the East was rerouted to the Cape of
Good Hope. European countries eyed us covet-
ously and regarded us as a crossroad to their colo-
nies in the East and the South.
Torrents of ideas and opinions burst upon us
which we were, at that stage of our evolution, inca-
pable of assimilating. Our spirits were still in the
Thirteenth Century though the symptoms of the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries iniltrated
in their various aspects. Our minds were trying to
catch up the [sic] advancing caravan of humanity
from which we fell back ive centuries or more.87
In such passages we hear an echo of Abduh, eager
to reconcile modernity with Egyptian circum-
stances and Islamic “tradition”; likewise, we hear
al- Banna’s emphasis on the “bonds of the East.”
We also hear familiar warnings about the specter
of backwardness and the need to recreate a golden
age of robust intra- Asian relations — all similar to
points raised by Tawād.u3 Pang. At the same time,
however, we hear progressivist assumptions about
history and time inherited from European posi-
tivism (“European society . . . crossed the bridge
between the Renaissance at the end of the Middle
Ages and the nineteenth century step by step”).
Thus Nasser threw out the philosophical baby but
kept the rhetorical bathwater: he discarded the
core of Islamic reformist thought, replacing its
temporality with one inherited from the West, all
87. Nasser, Philosophy of the Revolution, 42 –43.
• 34:1 • 2014
while adopting a language similar to that of the
Islamic reformers. Nasser — whose cabinet con-
tained Egyptians of every possible political persua-
sion (with the notable exception of any Wafdists)
and who for years skillfully played the Americans,
the British, the Soviets, the Chinese, and others
against one another — was after all the consum-
mate borrower of ideas and balancer of interests
domestically and internationally, politically and
intellectually. Adopting and adapting was his con-
stant unspoken strategy. In the process, however,
he presided over a fundamental retreat from the
more expansive political project of the interwar Is-
lamic reformists. After all, an independent nation-
state was too big a prize to risk on such projects.
Perhaps this is part of the reason why at Bandung,
Nasser and Zhou Enlai each found in the other a
kindred spirit.
Thus in a few short years, Tawād.u3 Pang
became a forgotten casualty of the birth of the
Third World. Between May 1945 and April 1955, al-
Banna’s “community of Islam” and “bonds of the
East” and Tawād.u3 Pang’s dream of returning to a
“golden age of Islam and Muslims” had given way
to the more ideologically minimalist, nation- state-
focused political projects of Third World leaders
like Nasser and Zhou Enlai. In both Egypt and
China, these national projects employed a rheto-
ric that shared several key elements with Islamic
reformism, even while marginalizing Muslims in
society. When Tawād.u3 Pang returned to China in
1947, it would not be long before he found a society
transformed. Like many other Hui, he attempted
to accommodate his politics and his thought to the
Communist Party’s atheism and anti-imperialism.
In stark contrast to anything found in China and
Islam, the opening to his 1950 book Nine Years in
Egypt focuses on condemning “US imperialism”
and retreats from any in- depth discussion of Islam.
He presents his years in Egypt primarily in terms
of the bilateral relations between two nation- states
with “great ancient civilizations” — not in terms of
the re- Orientation of the umma. He does maintain
some aspects of his previous politics, criticizing
the tendency of nations like China and Egypt to
relate to one another only through ambassado-
rial diplomacy.88 But to little avail. In a few short
88. Pang, Aiji Jiunian, 1.

years, Tawād.u3 Pang had seen his life turned
upside- down: unlike the luid interwar period, the
postwar period saw the rise of national regimes
in Egypt and China that made it impossible for
him to maintain an interstitial identity. He died in
1958, at the early age of ifty- six, due to unknown
causes. The Chinese Azharites’ legacy of transna-
tional exchange was stripped down and pressed
into the service of the nation- state. Meanwhile, the
Hui were left to fend for themselves as both China
and Egypt were drawn into a global cold war. The
politics of re- Orientation would continue, but not
in the manner envisioned by Tawād.u3 Pang. Much
was lost, and few took notice.
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