Based on his experiences during a journey through mainland Southeast Asia in 1923, Somerset Maugham wrote a book of colonial travel entitled The Gentleman in the Parlour. As the work of one of the most popular writers of the twentieth century, Maugham’s travelogue both expressed and helped to shape contemporary thinking about Southeast Asia and Western imperialism. Focusing especially on his re...

circumstances and development of Muslim nations has been the subject of intense debate among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Western critics of Islam or “Islamic civilization,” such as Bernard Lewis (1990) and Samuel Huntington (1993), have decried its economic irrationality, incompatibility with democracy, and failure to separate religion and state; while scholars such as Edward Said (2001:11) ...