Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (2005), which won the Harry J. Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, and The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (2013). He is Director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program at Cornell, Director of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, and editor of the journal Indonesia, and has recently served on the Southeast Asia Council of the Association of Asian Studies (AAS). Shawkat Toorawa is Associate Professor of Arabic Literature and Islamic Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur and Arabic Writerly Culture: A Ninth Century Bookman in Baghdad (2005), and the editor and coeditor of several collections, including The Western Indian Ocean: Essays on Islands and Islanders (2007) and Islam: A Short Guide to the Faith (2011). He is a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow, an Executive Editor of the Library of Arabic Literature, and serves on the editorial boards of Middle Eastern Literatures and the Journal of Abbasid Studies.