This chapter takes up a small part of the writings of a group of Muslim intellectuals from China who studied at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in the 1930s and 1940s and worked to think through the connections between China, Islam, the Arab world, and literatures in Chinese and Arabic. Through a close reading of Recollections of Childhood (Tongniande huiyi), Ma Junwu’s translation of the first volume of Taha Husayn’s The Days (al-Ayyām), we see how the Sino-Muslim Azharites provide a valuable historical example and theoretical resource for our own scholarly practice at a time when attempts to go beyond the boundaries of national literatures and languages default all too quickly to monolingual approaches.

This chapter rewrites the history of Egypt’s constitutional period (1923–1952) by examining a ‘culture war’ that broke out between graduates of Dar al-ʿUlum and Europhile modernist intellectuals such as Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Taha Husayn, and ʿAli ʿAbd al-Raziq. From 1930, Europhile modernist calls for westernisation fell on deaf ears due in large part to the darʿamiyya. Darʿamiyya continued to exercise significant influence over the teaching and reform of Arabic, including as members of the Royal Arabic Language Academy (Majmaʿ al-Lugha al-ʿArabiyya) from 1932. Furthermore, darʿamiyya Hasan al-Banna and Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood and Taqi al-Din al-Nabhani of Hizb al-Tahrir advanced explicitly Islamic alternatives to state-led projects of modernity. Their example established a new mode of religious leadership, the new religious intellectual, available to individuals without significant religious education. Europhile modernists responded differently to this loss of sociocultural authority. Haykal’s switch to writing about Islamic topics can be seen as an attempt to co-opt darʿami influence over popular views of religion. Husayn’s call for Dar al-ʿUlum to be subsumed into the Egyptian University’s College of Literature was a direct attack on the darʿamiyya’s sociocultural and professional authority.