William R. Roff has spent more than forty years studying and writing about the modern history of Islam, with special reference to Muslims in Southeast Asia. His interests lie primarily in social and intellectual history, and he has contributed essays to a wide range of learned journals and other publications. The present collection reprints a selection of the most notable of these articles, a body of writing that includes work on the development of Islamic educational and other institutions, the nature of the Arab presence in Southeast Asia, and the social significance of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, as well as studies in historiography and methodology. The author has been a formative influence on a large number of scholars, and this reissue in accessible form of seminal but scattered essays will be widely welcomed.