Dr Gualtherus Hendrik Albert Juynboll (Leiden 1935-2010) was the last scion of a prominent family of Leiden orientalists. An early ancestor served in the Navy of the Dutch Republic under Admiral Piet Hein and took part in the capture of a Spanish return fleet which carried bullion from the Americas in 1628. In the nineteenth century T.W.J. Juynboll (1802-1861) was professor of Oriental languages at Leiden University. A.W.Th. Juynboll (1834-1887) taught at the training college for colonial civil servants at Delft. Another sibling, Th.W. Juynboll (1866-1948), was a student of Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje and later became professor of Hebrew at Utrecht. Gual Juynboll’s aunt Wilhelmina M.C. Juynboll wrote an authoritative history of seventeenth-century Arabic scholarship in the Netherlands.

Gual (or 'Gautier') Juynboll studied Arabic and Islam at Leiden University, obtaining his doctoral degree under Jan Brugman in 1969. He subsequently worked and studied at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), Jerusalem (HUJI) and Exeter (UK). From 1985 onwards he was financially independent, which enabled him to devote himself exclusively to his studies.

Dr Juynboll was a widely renowned specialist of Hadith, the collection of sayings attributed to the Prophet Muhammad which rank second as a source of Islamic doctrine after the Quran. In 1983 Cambridge University Press published his work Muslim Tradition. Studies in Chronology, Provenance and Authorship of Early Hadith (Juynboll 1983).

His magnum opus Encyclopedia of Canonical Hadith was published by Brill (Leiden) in 2007 (Juynboll 2007a). This work contains a critical assessment of a large number of persons who were involved in the formation of Islamic orthodoxy.

Ever since his return from the United Kingdom to the Netherlands in 1985, Juynboll was a daily visitor of the Oriental reading room of Leiden University Library. Because of the enormous number of Islamic reference works he had to consult he obtained, among others, the privilege of using a book trolley, which served as an unmistakable sign of his presence in the reading room. He was dieply grieved when these privileges were withdrawn by the University Library during various organisational reforms since 2005. Nevertheless, Juynboll was devoted to the library, a sentiment he expressed in an autobiographical essay My Days in the Oriental Reading Room (Juynboll 2007, repr. 2011). Many generations of students of Arabic and Islam have fond memories of him and his unremitting readiness to help.

Juynboll passed away on 19 December 2010 as the last bearer of his family name. Friends and colleagues remember him as a slightly eccentric, sensitive and unusually talented scholar.

Professor Léon Buskens, chair of the Juynboll Stichting, contributed a biographical sketch of G.H.A. Juynboll to ZemZem, the only Dutch-language periodical on Middle Eastern studies (Buskens 2011). It does ample justice to the work and personality of this remarkable scholar. An English-language version is to appear in Bibliotheca Orientalis together with a bibliography of his works.