In recent years, North-South patterns of domination and neo-colonialism have occupied the field of social studies. One can argue that theories of modernization such as Lerner's The Passing of Traditional Society bear a certain similarity with dependency theories. Although these later writers formed their theories as a critique of modernizing theories, both perspectives are similar in that they analyze “traditional” or underdeveloped societies from a North-South point of view. Thus, if modernizing theories were criticized by neo-Marxists and Marxists alike as “ethnocentric” because they ignored non-Western types of development and praised Western history as an ideal type and a global model, in the discourse of dependency theories, the North was more than ever present in shaping and influencing the underdevelopment of the South. The impoverishment of the South was analyzed as a direct result of the enrichment of the industrialized North. Although diametrically opposite in ideological aims, these two theoretical perspectives share a common denominator in that they accept the predominance of Western culture and analyze the reaction of the Third World in relation to it. In other words, they both implied that all dynamics originate, and move mainly from the North. This paper will attempt to take a different perspective by looking into the different patterns of exchange on the South-South axis. In analyzing a particular set of networks and cultural exchange which was established through religious scholarship, this paper attempts to follow up Roffs study on “Indonesian and Malay Students in Cairo in the 1920s”. It will shed some light on the significance of al-Azhar in particular, and Cairo in general, as a centre of religious learning which attracts until today students from all over the Muslim world.