The Sinic–Islamic Alliance: A Civilisational March Through History

From Malacca to Bangladesh, a Sinic–Islamic alignment forged over centuries now reasserts itself with India squarely in its path.

American political scientist Samuel Huntington, in his 1996 book had theorized of a ‘clash of civilizations’ as the root cause of future global conflicts, emerging basically out of three factors - Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance and Sinic/Confusion/Chinese aggression. The history of conflicts unfolded thereafter stands to largely corroborate Huntington’s view. Further to identifying the warring (some willingly and some unwillingly) civilizations, Huntington had also pointed at an additional dimension of Sinic-Islamic alliance, by pointing at the then weapons proliferation between China and the Islamic world as the most extensive and concrete base of that connection, citing a number of instances of Chinese arms-supply to Islamic states of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and helping those like Pakistan and Iran in acquiring nuclear power technology and developing nuclear power. China’s special affection for Pakistan, reflecting in an intimate military relationship, had begun in the 1970s, growing more and more till date, was exposed once again during India’s ‘Operation Sindoor’ last May.

Islamic Onslaught

Huntington’s thesis, howsoever brilliant, suffered from an obvious limitation posed by his West-centric lenses. An Indian or Indic civilizational view-point can justifiably differ, in the sense of adding some worthy nuances, thereby widening the related time-frame of the civilizational rivalry playing out in the eastern Indo-Pacific. First of all, although Huntington theorized it in the mid-1990s, clashes of civilizations have taken place many times before that. The onslaught unleashed by Islam, post its birth in the seventh century, with a view to Islamizing the rest of the world, was a classic case in that context. The Spanish and Portuguese expeditions outside Europe, encouraged by papal blessings, were also no different in character. Secondly, even the Sinic-Islamic alliance is also not a twentieth century phenomenon for that matter.

Imperial China, obsessed with the self-image of being the ‘middle kingdom’ of the world, perhaps has been viewing the Indian/Indic civilization as a rival since centuries. History is aware of the supportive role played by China not only in founding the Islamic Sultanate of Malacca in Peninsular Malaysia in the beginning of the fifteenth century but also fortifying it with all the necessary support sustained through next few years, powering it to emerge as a prosperous Islamic religio-commercial hub of the Southeast Asian region. History is also aware of the active role, in turn, played by the Sultanate of Malacca in weakening the Majapahit empire of the Indonesian archipelago, the last and the strongest bastion of the Hindu-Buddhist civilization in Southeast Asia, and help engineering its eventual fall by the end of that century. The whole picture that emerges in this case, after joining the dots, stands testimony to the over five-hundred years old existence of Sinic-Islamic alliance that had successfully dislodged a robust flag-bearer of the Indic or Hindu-Buddhist civilization in its battle for survival in that geography of the world.   

Civilizational Response

A call for re-energizing the spirit of that alliance in a grand way was given last year. China and Malaysia took initiative in organizing an ‘ASEAN-GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council)-China’ Summit in Kuala Lumpur in the last week of May 2025. The theme was about organizing a ‘civilizational response’ to the global ‘xenophobia’, meaning their projections of Islamophobia and Sinophobia. This event can be viewed as nothing but reinforcing the historical alliance for the present global situations, and scaling it up to a grand level, attempting a Confusion collaboration with the entire Islamic world in place of the earlier Southeast Asia-confined model. Since it was the same Malaysia, on whose west coast the Malacca Sultanate had historically flourished with active Chinese help, both of them co-hosting this event carried a high symbolic value for all concerned.

Although China’s continuing appetite for alliance with the Islamic world is apparently global, the main theatre of action in the current century can be expected to be South Asia, where the base of an immediate rival from the vicinity viz. Indic or Hindu-Buddhist civilization exists in the entity of India. Action in the Southeast Asian theatre this time appears to have shrunk to only the publicity events, thereby indirectly messaging the Buddhist states of its mainland sub-region to be quieter and more submissive. All the necessary ground-work seem to be shaping up in a perfectly coordinated manner in the main theatre of South Asia in the meantime. The 2024 coup in Bangladesh, exiling PM Hasina to the expected refuge in India, made many experts speculate and link the intervention with either the US or China. Looking back, it can safely be presumed as rather a joint venture between both of them, with the latter having a larger and longer-term stakes involved. After the installation of ‘Nobel Laureate’ Yunus as interim administrator of Bangladesh by the US, the Sinic-Islamic alliance appears to have been activated in a logically sequential manner – i) Bangladesh practically transformed into its previous ‘East-Pakistan’ form by invoking rabid Islamism within; ii) it then formally renewed previously severed ties with Pakistan by not only forgetting the latter-committed genocide of 1971 but also by rewriting history to officially delete those records and erase memories, including those about India’s help in gaining freedom; iii) China organized a tri-lateral meeting with both of them, for discussing ‘maritime cooperation’ in the Indian Ocean; iv) China and Malaysia provided the intellectual cover of ‘struggle against Islamophobia and Sinophobia’ for all these manoeuvres.

The plot appears undoubtedly sinister. It would be naïve to imagine the entity of India meeting the Majapahit fate of downfall sooner or later. But the very fact of the well-coordinated Sinic-Islamic alliance having marched confidently across the Bay of Bengal, from Southeast Asian success to a South Asian dream-project, must cause longer-term worries in India, for bracing for all sorts of related challenges in future.    

(The writer is a research scholar in international relations. Views personal.)