This study aims to find out the Islamic students’ perception of writing essay challenges. The sample of this research is 47 students majoring in English Education in one of the Pesantren-s in East Java. The research method used is descriptive quantitative with survey techniques. In this study, a questionnaire was used to determine the frequency of answers and the percentage. The data is calculated with Microsoft Excel. The main findings of this study are: there are 4 types of problems that students face in their essay writing course. They are confused in developing topics, grammatical errors, word choice problems, and poor organization. The overall mean of students' writing problems in the fourth semester is 3.35 and is categorized as "high". Specifically, students' problems in developing topics are 3.46, grammatical errors (3.20), word choice problems (3.51), and poor organization (3.21). Furthermore, from the interpretation of the mean score, most of the students agreed that they had dominant problems in vocabulary and topic development.