Up to roughly the eleventh century, the expansion of Islam was largely ‘confined’ to the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, and some of Central Asia – the territories that had been conquered in the Arab-Islamic conquests (c. 632-750 CE). Gradual conversion to Islam continued for centuries until these core areas became decisively ‘Muslim’ by the fourteenth/fifteenth centuries. Beyond these heartlands, beginning in roughly in the eleventh century, Islam advanced into India, western China, Southeast Asia, and southern China, as well as into Anatolia, the Balkans, and sub-Saharan Africa. Though Islamization turned out to be uneven in varied settings, by around the year 1700, a trans-regional religio-political Muslim ecumene had been established from Senegal to Indo-Malaysia. We are given glimpses of this emerging ‘Muslim world’ in the writings of Ibn Ba??u?a (d. 1369), who visited nearly every corner of the Muslim ecumene (as it existed in the 1300s), and in the seventeenth-century scholarly career of N?r al-D?n Ran?r? (d 1658), who spent time in India, Egypt, Arabia, and Aceh. In short, it is between roughly 1100 and 1700 CE that Islam became a truly global phenomenon. This paper, based in part on a chapter of a forthcoming book with Edinburgh University Press, provides a fresh perspective on the spread of Islam during these centuries. Balancing the perspectives of Islamic sources with those of more recent scholarship (e.g., regarding the ‘missionary’ roles of Sufi saints and brotherhoods), and building on the work of scholars like Bulliet, Levtzion, Green, and others, the paper discusses six sets of ‘agents and patterns of Islamization’: (1) Peoples on the Move: Islamization through In-Migration; (2) Rulers and Ruler-Converts: Islamization by Royal Example or Decree; (3) ‘Ulama: Islamization through Knowledge Transmission; (4) Sufis: Islamization through Indigenization; (5) Preachers and Storytellers: Islamization through Popularization; and (6) Merchants: Islamization through Networking. While the pre-modern ‘ulama and Sufis come nearest to embodying what many today understand by the word ‘missionary,’ the paper demonstrates that this period furnishes few examples of organized Islamic missionary outreaches. In most cases, gradual processes of Islamization followed more or less indirectly from dynamics such as conquest, migration, trade, and quests for knowledge and union with God. By describing Islamization from c. 1100-1700 in this way, the paper not only takes into account a wide array of the available historical evidence, it also serves to counter prevalent stereotypes about Islamization (e.g., the ‘spread-by-the-sword’ notion).