Acknowledgments
I would like to express my warmest gratitude to a number of colleagues and friends, in particular, to Prof. Gerard Wiegers, Prof. Mercedes García-Arenal and Dr. Richard van Leeuwen for their insightful advice and tireless support. Their scholarly excellence, outstanding human qualities, work ethos and enthusiasm have been a model to me and a source of inspiration which has made the writing of this book a most exciting and enriching life experience. My most special thanks goes for Prof. Wiegers, whose expertise and invaluable assistance have been instrumental in this project. I want to thank Prof. García-Arenal for giving me the opportunity to participate in the Project Conversion, Overlapping, Religiosities, Polemics and Interaction (CORPI), ERC, CSIC, in Madrid. This has made it possible to broaden my perspectives, to rethink some of my questions and to make contact with other scholars, young and old, in my field of expertise, particularly in Spain. I am also very grateful to Dr. Van Leeuwen for making the point that theory exists by the grace of the theorist and is relative and to Prof. Ryan Szpiech for his insightful and valuable suggestions during the proofreading of the manuscript.
I thank the Netherlands Interuniversity School for Islamic Studies (NISIS) for providing the necessary financial support for this research and for encouraging me to maintain a fruitful dialogue with a network of scholars on Islam and Muslim societies within and outside The Netherlands. I am also indebted to the Catharine van Tussenbroekfonds for its support in the preliminary study of the sources in the libraries in Madrid, and to the Max Planck Society. I also want to show my gratitude to the Director of the Department of Manuscripts and Rare Books, Dr. Andreas Fingernagel, for letting me work with the manuscript in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna, and for using some of the illustrations contained in this book, as well as to the staff of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, of the Real Academia de la Historia, of the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás and of the Instituto de Valencia de Don Juan in Madrid for their help during my search. My thanks to Prof. Juan Carlos Villaverde Amieva and Prof. Càndida Ferrero Hernández for sending materials to which I would otherwise have had no access. I am afraid that I have overlooked a large number of people who have given me support and helped me to solve various problems in various places. Please forgive me.
Last but not least, I would like to thank my family. They have been my daily rock solid support in completing this book.