Acknowledgements

This work is unusual, perhaps even unique, in modern American letters, for it was collectively conceived, collaboratively researched, and cooperatively written by nine coauthors, not as an anthology of individual contributions, but as a single cohesive work. Although portions of the book were originally penned by one or another of our group (particularly the translations), the final product is the result of many readings, revisions, and discussions among all of the researchers. This approach is common in the physical and life sciences and, to a lesser extent, in the social sciences but remains rare in the humanities. The scope of this project, however, would have challenged the capacity of any single scholar, and the topic, once raised, was compelling. As a result, all of the coauthors took large amounts of time from their individual research plans to contribute to this joint effort.

The seeds of this project were first sown in 1990 during a summer getaway on the shores of Lake Sammamish outside Seattle, Washington, where Joseph Lowry's parents, Larry and Louise Lowry, graciously hosted a raucous bunch of young academics who at the time seemed equally interested in local viniculture and Derrida's writings on autobiography.

Having argued endlessly (or so we thought at the time) about whether the handful of medieval Arabic autobiographies we knew constituted a tradition, or indeed even constituted autobiographies at all, we spent two years seeking out and reading additional texts. In August 1992, with support from the University of California at Santa Barbara's Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, Center for Black Studies under the directorship of Charles Long, and Department of Religious Studies, we met for a week of presentations and discussions only to discover, somewhat to our dismay, that we had uncovered far more premodern Arabic autobiographies than we properly knew what to do with: not twenty or twenty-five, but well over fifty.

In summer 1993 and again in 1997, we were generously welcomed and hosted at the Middlebury Summer School of Arabic by then-director Mahmoud Al-Batal, whose boundless hospitality and encouragement greatly contributed to the completion of this work. Throughout those years our corpus of texts continued to grow—sixty, seventy, eighty—and our work in reading these newly uncovered texts, discussing recurring themes, and attempting to understand the motivations and worldviews of these medieval authors continued apace.

At the annual meetings of the Middle Eastern Studies Association in 1993 and again in 1994, the authors presented panels of papers exploring sample texts from the premodern Arabic autobiographical tradition. Under the insightful guidance of Julie Scott Meisami and Michael Beard, versions of these papers were published as a special edition of Edebiyât: The Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures (1997), guest edited by Dwight F. Reynolds under the watchful eye of his research assistant, Sandra Campbell.

Along the way, many others helped with their suggestions, encouragement, and guidance, among them ‘Abd al-Ḥamīd Ḥawwās, Roger Allen, Adel Allouche, Patricia Crone, Patricia Eisenlohr, Richard Hecht, Janet Gyatso, Michael Hopper, Stephen Humphreys, John Hunwick, Eve Troutt Powell, Werner Sollors, and Pei-Yi Wu. Their contributions are much appreciated.

We also wish to thank Ibrahim Muhawi for his meticulous comments and valuable suggestions on the manuscipt, as well as our anonymous reader. Lynne Withey, associate director of the University of California Press, provided inestimable encouragement and, more important, proved to be extraordinarily patient with our slow but steady process toward completion.

For their hours of research assistance and for cheerfully putting up with the editor's foibles, I personally wish to thank Sandra Campbell, Adrian DeGifis, and Linda Jones at the University of California at Santa Barbara, as well as our copyeditor, Sheila Berg, and our project editor, Rose Anne White.

It has fallen to me to do the final editing, and although my colleagues have rescued me again and again from errors I managed to introduce into various stages of the manuscript, both factual and interpretive, there are no doubt many that have not been expunged from the final text. These I claim as my own and hope that they may provide fodder for future publications by other scholars who will be able to revise, amend, and add to what we have assembled here as a first foray into a virtually untouched field.

The process of working as a collective on such a far-reaching project has at times been slow and awkward, for we did not always see eye to eye on all of the critical issues; but the overall richness of this extended collaboration, even if only measured by what I personally have learned from these scholars and friends, has far outweighed the additional work involved. At a time when our institutions often cut us off from our colleagues as much as they help to link us together, this project has provided a constant reminder of the joy and satisfaction that can and should grow out of the academic endeavor.

Dwight F. Reynolds
University of California at Santa Barbara