William R. Roff has spent more than forty years studying and writing about the modern history of Islam and Muslims, with special reference to Southeast Asia. With interests primarily in social and intellectual history he has contributed essays during this period to a wide range of learned journals and other publications. The present collection reprints a selection of the most notable of these, from historiographical and methodological studies to the development of Islamic educational and other institutions, the nature of the Arab presence in Southeast Asia, and the social significance of the hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca. The author has been a formative influence on two generations of students and other scholars, and this reissue in accessible form of seminal but scattered essays will be widely welcomed.