A seminar held at Kings College, London University, May 20, 2022 in memory of Professor Tony Allan

Ladies and gentlemen.

I will tell you this morning about my personal memories of Tony and about some of his work.

In 1998, after a thirty-year career in banking, I became a student at SOAS. I was seeking answers to questions on the likelihood for political and religious reforms in Arab countries. 

I vividly remember my first meeting with Tony. It was at the SOAS Staff Common Room. Four hours later, we were still discussing how and why two different and contrasting countries, Saudi Arabia; a free market absolute monarchy, and Syria; a socialist military dictatorship, were since the 1970s engaged in water politics that exhausted much of their non-renewable aquifers and ruined the quality of what was left.

Our discussion became the subject of my “recreational Ph.D”, as Tony used to joke about my status among his students.

That meeting introduced me to my best friend. It shaped my life in retirement.

For the twenty years before his passing, Tony and I met weekly. For a dozen years or so, we met at SOAS. Later, we met at my home, on Fridays at 10:00am. From time to time, the meeting would include friends of Tony. Some are here today. Tony’s friends are now my friends. During the Covid months, we kept our Friday date, this time, however, on the telephone. On many occasions, I had the good fortune to accompany Tony to lectures he was invited to. 

Tony was a towering figure: humanitarian, thoughtful, kind, discreet, a great listener, humble, unassuming, sincere, and full of empathy. He was the perfect gentleman. He was inspirational. 

Tony was a strategic thinker. He had an immense capacity to see the big picture. His intellectual interests were wide ranging. Tony loved teaching. His graduates are in the East and the West. 

Tony observed that like money, which measures the value of goods, agricultural produce may be expressed in terms of the water needed to plant, grow, harvest, and ready for consumption.

Tony developed the concept that food is an encapsulation of water, virtual water. He transformed the way we think about domestic water policy-making and international trade in virtual water.

For his ground-breaking contributions, we all hailed Tony’s prize from the Stockholm International Water Institute, among others. 

Tony maintained that economic science is theory, but political economy is reality. He liked Marc Reisner’s book Cadillac Desert, especially the statement that “water flows uphill toward money.”

In this spirit, my own work, under Tony’s supervision, was a case study in the unholy exchange by the rulers of Saudi Arabia and Syria of their limited non-renewable aquifers’ water in return for loyalty from their ruling groups.

Tony was a proponent of surface tilling. Also, he held that farmers control 90% of agricultural water. He believed that farmers’ share from the food pie is miniscule, compared to the rest of the food chain. To raise farmers’ income and to avert a greater damage to global water resources, Tony advocated that water should be accounted for.

Tony and I spent hours discussing how politics decide accounting rules. In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission is responsible for making accounting rules and enforcing them; notwithstanding, that it delegated in 1973, the rule-making part to a private sector body, the Financial Accounting Standards Board. As such, accountants and auditors may be described as photographers taking financial pictures with cameras programmed by the SEC.

Here, again, Tony was right: Political accounting is reality.

Tony was unhappy with the slow development of the green-bonds market. We discussed that if issuers and investors were sincere and true to their green credentials, the lenders should be willing to accept a slightly lower yield, and the issuers should be prepared to pay a slightly higher rate of interest over non-green bonds of similar risk and maturity.

Tony’s intellectual interests extended to the development of religious ideas. We often deliberated over the strong influence culture has on people’s decisions and explained certain recent consequential political events dressed in religious garb.

Tony was a friend of John Wansbrough, professor of Semitic Studies at SOAS. Tony admired Wansbrough. The admiration was mutual. Wansbrough was instrumental in promoting Tony to a full Professor at SOAS. We often discussed Wansbrough’s findings in his seminal book: Islamic Studies.

Among other matters, Tony was unhappy that SOAS gave up its Geography Department.

He was against Brexit and the war in Iraq.

On a different matter, Tony was baffled by the refusal of Senate House of his repeated suggestions that Ph.D. dissertations should be printed on both sides of the paper, not on one side, in order to save paper and storage space.

Tony connected water issues with politics and economics within a social context. The final product has been brilliant.

Thank you very much for listening.