In a long and distinguished career, Carole Hillenbrand has become best known as an Islamic historian of the Seljuks and the Crusades. For her work on the latter she won in 2005 the prestigious King Faisal Prize for Islamic Studies, the first non-Muslim to be honoured in this way. However, Carole's scholarly interests go far beyond history in the technical sense to include Sufism and Islamic thought. Carole has published in all these areas, out of conviction that the best scholarship on Islamic history and Islamic studies should view Islam not just as a religion but also as a civilisation. This is precisely how Carole has approached her teaching at Edinburgh – where I had the pleasure of working with her for over 16 years – to generations of undergraduate students as well as in her supervision of scores of postgraduates. Carole has always believed that serious teaching and research cannot but be language-based. This explains her proficiency in so many languages and her insistence on teaching the first-year Arabic course at the university for over twenty years.

The contributions in this volume reflect Carole's scholarly interests. While history, naturally, predominates, Islamic culture and Islamic studies are present in force. Some of the essays deal with the problematic nature of the sources of Islamic history; others deal with aspects of Islamic thought and culture of interest to scholars of Sunni and Shi‘ite Islam.