As this special issue went to press, Alan Jones very sadly died. A leading figure in Oriental Studies at Oxford for over half a century, Alan will be remembered with great fondness by several generations of students and colleagues in Arabic and Islamic Studies, while members of Oxford’s Jewish Studies community will recall with gratitude his role in the founding of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and his many years of service on the Centre's Board of Governors. Beyond Oxford, his scholarly prowess will continue to be recognized by readers of his unsurpassed English translation of the Qur’ān, his very popular Arabic Through the Qur’ān, and his definitive studies of early Arabic poetry.
An enthusiastic contributor to the Stern project from its early stages, Alan has been a great source of encouragement and support as the project has developed, and it is a tremendous source of sadness that he has not lived to see the final product appear in print. Nevertheless, we can be grateful that, despite his ill-health, Alan was able to complete his tribute to the scholar who showed him the way in the study of Andalusian lyric poetry. Alan concludes that tribute by noting that, “in this as in other fields of scholarship”, Stern was irreplaceable. Much the same could be said of Alan Jones himself.