Of intellectual friendship in fin-de-siècle London.

To Tony Allan I owe joy in intellectual friendship. Early on, Tony opened the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies for me, a mere graduate student, to convene an international conference on Islamic finance. I also co-wrote the introduction with him ([8]), and contributed a chapter ([9]) for a state-of-the art book resulting from a big conference on Water in the Middle East which we convened in November 1992 (Allan & Mallat, [3]). There was the Nile book which he put together with a specialist colleague (Allan & Howell, [2]), to which I contributed a chapter (Mallat, [7]). [Extracted from the article]