This book provides a new answer to an old and often-asked question: why did the bulk of conversion to Islam take place not in the imperial heartlands of the Indo-Islamic world but among the indigenous populations of the Indus borderlands and the coastal, maritime and insular peripheries of the Indian Ocean and the Malay-Indonesian archipelago? The answer is found in the conjunction of geographical, political and economic factors affecting the Indo-Islamic states of the 13th to 17th centuries, both in their medieval origins and their interaction with the Portuguese Estado da India and the East India Companies. About the Author André Wink, Ph.D. Leiden (1984), is H. Kern Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Prior to that, he taught and lectured at numerous universities in the USA, Europe and Asia, and was a fellow/ member at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and the Institute for Research in the Humanities. He is the author of Land and Sovereignty in India (1986), Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World, Volumes I-III (1990-2004), Akbar (2008), and other works, many of which have been translated into Arabic, Turkish, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and other major languages.