The first book I bought after I arrived in Oxford in September 1984 to begin work on my D.Phil. was Sir Charles Lyall's The Dīwāns of ʿAbīd ibn al-Abraṣ, of Asad, and ʿĀmir ibn aṭ-Ṭufail, of ‘Āmir ibn Ṣa‘ṣa‘ah, Edited for the First Time, from the MS. in the British Museum, and Supplied with a Translation and Notes. I bought it (at the price of £8.50) from the Oriental section of what was then Thornton's Bookshop on Broad Street, conveniently located opposite Balliol College, of which I had just become a junior member. I relished the distinct novelty of being able to purchase in person books that featured Arabic: at the University of Glasgow the study of Arabic did not attract enough students to justify the availability of such books in the university bookshop.

This was a rare moment of serendipity. I had been admitted to study pre-Islamic poetry for my D.Phil., and I proposed to look in particular at panegyric poems in the corpus. I had not decided to study any individual poet as such but planned to take as broad a view of the corpus as possible and to try to sketch the contours of the genre, fated to become so prominent in, and central to, the tradition and practice of Arabic poetry that developed during the Islamic periods. I was conscious therefore that I needed to read widely in the poetry, and I needed to read it with a certain degree of dispatch, if I were not to fail in my ambition to limn the contours of the genre. Lyall's book included translations and several valuable indices. It did not take me long to decide to purchase it, despite its price being almost equivalent to the sum I had calculated as my weekly food bill (£10). Consequently, the poetry of ‘Abid featured prominently in my first-ever published article, ‘Dichotomy in Jāhilī poetry’.

This was not my first encounter with a work on early Arabic poetry by Sir Charles Lyall. Two years previously I had spent a summer in the Glasgow University Library inching my way laboriously, but diligently, though a selection of poems taken from his magnum opus: The Mufaḍḍalīyāṭ: An Anthology of Ancient Arabian Odes, published by The Clarendon Press.