Acknowledgements
Gautier ‘Gual’ Juynboll was a great scholar and a remarkable person. Anyone who interacted with him or his work could not help but be struck by his passionate investment in the world of early Islam, his total immersion in the sources of the period, and his almost confrontational engagement with the research questions that the field brings up. His presence in the Oriental Reading Room of Leiden University Library offered at one and the same time a sense of reassuring regularity and a refreshing disturbance to the academic routine. Students and colleagues were regularly invited to join in unexpected finds from his annotated Mizzī, which formed the basis of his research on hadith, and regaled with anecdotes on sundry topics. His last great expression of his lifelong commitment to scholarship was his decision to leave his books to his beloved library and to bequeath his possessions and property to a fund to further research, which resulted in the Juynboll Foundation, established in 2011 to promote the study of Arabic and Islam at Leiden by providing financial support to (especially younger) scholars.
After Gual’s untimely death in December 2010 it was immediately obvious that his contribution to the study of early Islam should be honoured with a scholarly meeting and a publication. In fact, two meetings were organised at Leiden University to recognise his achievement. The first conference took place in 2011, followed by a second one in 2015. We are very grateful to the Juynboll Foundation and Leiden University Centre for the Study of Islam and Society (LUCIS) for sponsoring these two meetings, and we would like to thank all of the participants in these meetings, not all of whose presentations have ended up in this publication, for their contributions to honouring Gual’s memory through their stimulating discussions and—in keeping with Gual’s spirit—inspiring company and sociability.
This volume could not have been realised without the help of a number of people. We are grateful to the anonymous readers for their helpful remarks on earlier versions of the papers. Annemarie van Sandwijk, Nienke van Heek, Birte Kristiansen and Nynke van der Veldt of Leiden University deserve special mention for their assistance during the editorial process. The bibliography has been compiled by Arjan Post. We would also like to thank LUCIS, the Leiden Institute for Area Studies (LIAS), and the European Research Council (ERC, grant agreement ID 683194) for making this assistance available. Particular thanks are due to the Juynboll Foundation for sponsoring the open access format in which this volume appears next to its printed form, as well as to our Brill editors, Teddi Dols, Abdurraouf Oueslati and Maurits van den Boogert, who have offered unfaltering encouragement throughout the publication process. Finally, we should like to thank Léon Buskens who, as director of LUCIS at the time of the first meeting and chair of the board of the Juynboll Foundation, has been instrumental in pushing this project forward.
Leiden, 10 December 2019