The publication year of each volume and the type of binding for volumes nine and ten were noted incorrectly. We regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.

Forced migration has come to be the defining feature of the contemporary Middle East, a region that is both the source of and host to some of the largest forcibly displaced populations in the world. In 2015, 65 percent of the world's 19.4 million refugees—including the 5.5 million Palestinian refugees—as well as 30 percent of the world's thirty-eight million internally displaced persons were in the Middle East, while one out of every four refugees worldwide was from Syria. Seeking security and stability, millions of people from the region are on the move within and across social spaces that are at once strange and familiar, and in which they themselves are familiar and strange to others. In 2015, Turkey became host to the world's largest refugee population of over two million, while Zaʿatari camp in Jordan has grown rapidly to become one of the world's largest camps since the Syrian civil war began. With 7.6 million people—or 35 percent of the population—internally displaced, Syria now has the highest number of internally displaced persons in the world. Iraq has produced multiple overlapping displacements, resulting in one of the largest refugee resettlement programs of the past decade. Thousands of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqis have undertaken perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to seek asylum in Europe and elsewhere. Palestinian refugees are now in a fourth generation of exile, making their plight the longest running unresolved refugee situation in the world.

Since Thursday, 11 June 2015, the pen of Germany's most prolific modern Middle East historian rests. Thomas Philipp's scholarly work will live on and inspire new generations of historians of Syria and Arab intellectual history. Although we will miss his humanity and personality, we will carry both within us. We have known for years that Thomas was battling cancer. And yet, when the tragic news of his passing emerged out of Erlangen that Friday, it hit me like a lightening bolt: it could not be; thoughts of denial rushed through my head. Had I not spoken to him just the other day? It felt like it. I checked my inbox: our last correspondence—March . . . three months had passed! And no mention of health concerns. We must have been too busy whipping into shape his two chapters for an edited volume on Albert Hourani's Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).