Acknowledgments
I am much obliged and extend my gratitude to Mr. Sulayman Babziz (Algeria), Prof. Sabine Schmidtke, Mrs. Marian Zelazny (Princeton IAS), Prof. Ridwan El-Sayed (Lebanon), Dr. Khalid Omar (Egypt), Rev. Chris Howitz and James Budd (England) and Jana Newiger (Göttingen University). I wish to express my gratitude to Prof. Ayatollah Hossein Modarressi (Princeton University). I am very grateful also to Prof. Sebastian Günther and Prof. Hinrich Biesterfeldt (Göttingen University) for their enormous guidance and advice; my sincere thanks to them for their insightful and most helpful suggestions at every stage of bringing this volume to completion. Finally, I would like to express my special thanks and gratitude to Teddi Dols and Pieter te Velde and their colleagues at Brill.
The basic work in preparing this edition was carried out during an invited visit at the Institute for Advance Study in Princeton, January–April 2018. My thanks are due to the institute for offering an ideal environment for joint scholarly research. I also wish to express my thanks to the Patricia Crone fellowship, which provided the funding for my stay at the institute.