Andrew Rippin, the British-Canadian specialist of the Qurʾan, classical Islam and the study of religion passed away on Tuesday, 29 November 2016 in his home in the city of Victoria, Canada. He began his intellectual journey forty years ago while studying traditions ascribed to ʿAbd Allah b. ʿAbbas (d. 68/687), the “founding father” of Qurʾanic Studies. Since then Andrew's many writings on Islamic scripture and Muslim life made him a prolific scholar of international repute. His penetrating critical insights were welcomed by the students he taught and the colleagues with whom he collaborated, both in the western academe and among the Islamic seminaries of Iran, Turkey, and Indonesia, and at various academic conferences around the world. Andrew is known best, perhaps, for his critical studies of the body of Qurʾanic exegetical tradition (Tafsir) and subsequent literary and historical studies of the text known as the Qurʾanic sciences (ʿUlum al-qurʾan).

Mustafa Olpak, author of Kenya-Crete-Istanbul: Human Biographies from the Slave Coast, a family history of African slaves in the Ottoman Empire and their descendants in the Turkish Republic, as well as founder of the Africans Culture and Solidarity Association, died of heart failure on 3 October 2016. He was 63 years old.

Gustav Bayerle died on 12 October 2016 in San Jose, California, at the age of 85. A refugee immigrant to the United States after the 1956 Hungarian revolution, Dr. Bayerle was a longtime faculty member and department chair at Indiana University. He was respected for his scholarship, his mentoring of students, and his leadership within the Turkish Studies Association of North America.

Richard L. Chambers was born on 27 September 1929 in Brundidge, Alabama, and died on 1 August 2016 in Montgomery, Alabama. He attended the University of Alabama, studying diplomatic and Middle Eastern history and gaining a B.A. in 1950. He obtained a B.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University and a fellowship at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. He then pursued an M.A. in History at Alabama, graduating in 1955, just when Middle Eastern studies really began to expand nationwide. He moved to Princeton for a second master's in 1958 and a Ph.D. in 1968. He studied with Ottoman historian Lewis Thomas and wrote a dissertation on Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, the nineteenth-century Ottoman intellectual, historian, and statesman.

Halil İnalcık was born in Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, into a refugee family, probably in 1916 (he did not know his birthday; in Turkey he adopted 29 May, in the US 4 July). He died at age 100 in Ankara on 25 July 2016, as the premier Ottoman historian in the world. To quote one of his students, “Professor İnalcık transformed the field of Ottoman studies from an obscure and exotic subfield into one of the leading historical disciplines that covers the history of the greater Middle East and North Africa as well as the Balkans from the late medieval to the modern period. He set the tone of debate and critical inquiry from the early modern to the modern period.” Born an Ottoman, he made Ottoman studies a crucial part of world history.