MARTIN HINDS’ FIRST DEGREE (1962) was in Arabic, and all of his academic posts were officially concerned with the study of the language. By his own account, he spent virtually all of his time from 1972 until1980 and a large part of that between 1980 and 1986 working on the lexicon of modern Egyptian Arabic. That work had begun during his association with the American University in Cairo from 1970 to 1975, and bore fruit in the publication (together with El-Said Badawi) of A Dictionary of Modern Egyptian Arabic (Arabic-English﹜ in 1986. Had he done nothing else, the dictionary would have ensured him a reputation as a leading western scholar of Arabic in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, following his B.A. he had enrolled for a research degree in Islamic History, and in 1969 the University of London awarded him his Ph.D. for his thesis, The Early History of Islamic Schism in Iraq. In the years between that date and his untimely death on 1 December 1988, less than twenty years later, he made through his publications a distinctive and notable contribution to our understanding of the history of the Islamic Middle East. In addition to the papers collected for this volume, there are five books which have to be taken into account. He saw only two of them in their published form. In 1986 there appeared, written together with Patricia Crone, God's Caliph, an important and radical reassessment of the development of ideas about religious and political authority in early Islam. In the same year, Arabic Documents from the Ottoman Period from Qa∼r Ibrzm, produced jointly with Hamdi Sakkout, made available 61 seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury documents (fifteen fully translated, the rest in summary) from a site in upper Egypt which had been an Ottoman garrison town in its later phases. Three other works appeared posthumously. In 1990 Hinds’ volume (XXIII: The Zenith of the Marwiinid House) of the SUNY Press series, The History of al-'J'abarf, was published. The series makes available for the first time an annotated English translation of the whole of one of the major sources for the early history of Islam. An Early Islamic Family from Oman, which appeared in 1991, is another annotated translation, this time of part of a late work from Oman which has details, unknown from other sources, relating to the early history of the central Islamic world.