I remember that in the autumn of 1985, sitting in the small lecture room of a long since vanished Oriental Institute at Frankfurt University, I waited, together with a dozen other students, for the entry of a famous guest speaker from Barcelona, Juan Vernet, whose La cultura hispanoárabe en Oriente y Occidente had been translated into German by a member of our staff and published only the year before. Vernet was a polymath, and his talk, delivered in fluent, slightly old-fashioned German, was a memorable tour de force into the history of Islamic science, and notably its development in Arab Spainâan eye-opener for most of us. Along the way, Vernet repeatedly referred to Ibn Juljulâs ṬabaqÄt al-aá¹ibbÄʾ wa-l-ḥukamÄʾ âGenerations of Physicians and Sagesâ, and that was probably the first time I heard of this important book at all. In the decades that followed, and thanks not least to Vernetâs wonderful lecture, I became a frequent user, then admirer of the ṬabaqÄt and gradually realized, not only the value of this text as a historical source but also its literary beauty. It is therefore with a mixture of satisfaction and regret that I am now releasing a complete English translation of Ibn Juljulâs Arabic bookâsatisfaction because the work is done, regret because it could have been done earlier.
I am indebted most of all to Cristina Ãlvarez Millán for her kindness and generous sharing of knowledge, material, and time. Many thanks are due to EloÃsa Llavero Ruiz for authorizing the University of Granada Library to digitize her unpublished 1979 Spanish translation of Ibn Juljulâs ṬabaqÄt, and to the aforesaid institution for putting a digital copy freely at my disposal. I am grateful to the editors of HdO for accepting my work in this series; to the anonymous readers for their remarks; to Abdurraouf Oueslati at Brill for his competence and cordiality; and to Sanne Hadfy-Kovács at TAT Zetwerk for the fine typesetting.
O. Kahl