No one should be fooled by the title of this book: it is much more than a simple biography of a major Southeast Asian Islamic scholar. Francis Bradley documents a major shift in the society of Patani (in modern-day southern Thailand) over several centuries. Before the eighteenth century, the polity was majority Muslim, focused power in the palace and traditional Malay kingship, and engaged in tributary arrangements with Siam. As the expanding Siamese state crushed Patani militarily in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a diaspora of Patani people spread across Southeast Asia and also to Mecca, and authority in this (now partially diasporic) society shifted to an Islamic idiom. In the Islamic schools, called pondok, that grew out of this trend in the nineteenth century, the work of Shaykh Dā’ūd (1769–1847) as a major author and translator of religious texts became highly influential. It is in the context of this fundamental transformation—from a geographically cohesive, royalty-focused polity to a diffuse, Islamically driven diasporic society—that Bradley presents the life and legacy of Shaykh Dā’ūd.

After a useful and engaging introduction, chapters 2 and 3, which chronicle Patani as an independent polity and then its destruction at the hands of the Siamese, are important for the arc of the argument but will mostly appeal to historians. The strongest moments come in chapter 4, when Bradley describes the oeuvre of Shaykh Dā’ūd, carefully periodizing and contextualizing it in the politics of nineteenth-century Mecca. Chapter 5, with a summary and exegesis of two major works, and chapters 6 and 7, on the afterlife of Shaykh Dā’ūd's works among his students and in Islamic schools on the Malay-Thai peninsula and beyond, will be of interest to scholars not just in history but also religion and cultural studies. A brief afterword does not try to summarize the book but rather lays out a few echoes into the twentieth century.

Bradley's book feels new and fresh both because it opens up the history of Patani, an important but very understudied region, and because it utilizes a huge corpus of Jawi manuscripts across four continents that has previously been ignored. Working primarily from collections in Malaysia, but also as far away as South Africa (documented not only in the bibliography, but also on his helpful and promising website, www.patanistudies.com), Bradley uses colophons and internal clues to demonstrate how a new network of Islamic scholarship and authority spread across the Patani diaspora and nearby Malay-speaking communities.

At the same time, many aspects of this book complement the recent historiography of Islamic revivalism in Southeast Asia very neatly. Bradley seems aware of the literature, but surprisingly he did not engage as deeply as expected with the recent work of Laffan, Hadler, and Ricklefs, or more current literature on Islam beyond Southeast Asia, when arguing for a “textual turn” that he describes as “the fresh wave of Muslim belief and practice promoted by the knowledge network of the Patani scholars and related movements” (p. 13). Instead, this book very clearly builds on the path-breaking work of Azyumardi Azra to pose a bold challenge specifically to the literature on Islam in Malaysia and southern Thailand. One hopes other scholars step up to accept; for the moment, we can only thank Bradley for so eloquently throwing down the gauntlet and reframing our understanding of Patani and Islam on the peninsula.