The “Far Eastern Islamic Federation”: Al-Azhar and Asian Muslim Regionalism before Bandung, 1930–55

By 1940, over 600 non-Egyptian students from 36 countries were studying at al-Azhar, Cairo’s ancient center of Islamic learning. An atmosphere of egalitarianism, fraternity, and common purpose prevailed. Egypt's Kings, the Muslim Brotherhood, Arabic publishers, and al-Azhar itself all sought stronger ties with foreign Muslim communities. Simultaneously, al-Azhar's “Asian” students—from China, Malaysia, India, and elsewhere—forged special bonds. As much as they imagined Islamic unity in the broadest terms, these Asian Muslims also pursued regional solidarities. Post-WWII, the contrasting regionalism of the newly formed Arab League, and Asian Muslims’ underrepresentation at the founding UN conference in San Francisco, heightened their anxieties about exclusion from postwar Islamic transnationalism.

Using Arabic, Chinese, and other sources, this paper introduces and contextualizes the “Far Eastern Islamic Federation”: an unfinished vision of Muslim solidarity, articulated by al-Azhar's Asian students. They conceived of an institution based on a set of common interests and endeavors, which could provide a platform for their voices on a transnational stage. Rooted in the institutional form and intellectual substance of al-Azhar, and reinforced by Hajj, travel, commerce, and wartime diplomacy, the idea of the Far Eastern Islamic Federation represents a lost history of Asian Muslims’ attempts to balance national, regional, and global Islamic identities, all while carrying forward the reforms their Azhar mentors had advocated into a new world of decolonization and Cold War.