Since Islam established a foothold in the entrepôts of Southeast Asia in the early days of the ‘Abb?sid Caliphate, traders, travellers, and envoys from the Middle East have consistently referred to Southeast Asia as the lands ‘Below the Winds’. The region has always been defined in the lexicons of the Arab and the Persian by the monsoon winds that brought prized commodities, from spices to Chinese porcelains, to the central lands of Islam. How, then, did Arabs and Persians think beyond economic terms about their coreligionists in these distant lands? This paper attempts to answer this question by examining sources from the Early Modern Period, or the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries CE, a historical moment marked by the rapid Islamization of Southeast Asia. One might expect for the expanding reach of the umma to be a cause of celebration among Arab and Persian writers. The converse, however, is attested in the scant historical record of non-commercial documents, consisting of Arabic navigational treatises by Shih?b al-D?n A?mad ibn M?jid and Sulaym?n ibn A?mad al-Mahr?, and of a Persian-language Safavid embassy travelogue by Mo?ammad Rabi‘ ebn Mo?ammad Ebr?him entitled Safine-ye Solaym?ni. What becomes apparent through a critical reading of these sources is that even though Southeast Asian Muslims were attempting to engage with broader Islamic conversations that emanated from the west, the Muslims of the heartland rarely integrated their coreligionists into their mental topographies of the umma. While the quantity of primary sources is insufficient to make definitive claims about the reasons for this phenomenon, this paper suggests, given the rivalries between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Twelver Sh?‘? ?afavid Empire, that most Muslims of the west were preoccupied with doctrinal difference, and seem unlikely to have had a broader consciousness of the possibilities of a global umma.