In his RoMES 49(2) review of my Striving in the Path of God, Christopher Melchert significantly misrepresents some of my arguments and omits reference to other key arguments that would undermine some of his assertions. I refer below to some of the more egregious instances.

Born in Austria in 1918, Elizabeth spent the World War II years in Istanbul where her father was professor of medicine at Istanbul University. This resulted not only in her learning Turkish but also in developing an interest in Byzantine art and archaeology, leading to a dissertation on Byzantine ceramics. In 1945 she married Richard Ettinghausen, who had recently joined the Freer Gallery of Art and was also lecturing at Princeton University. That marked the beginning of Elizabeth's ties with the town where she lived for many years. In 1966 Richard became Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Islamic Art at the Institute of Fine Arts and in 1969 he was appointed Consultative Chairman of the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Meanwhile, in addition to pursuing her art–historical interests, Elizabeth was bringing up their two sons in Princeton. Today, the elder son teaches and practices medicine in Rochester, NY, and the younger is in international finance in Abu Dhabi.

Dr. Yunus Jaffery, distinguished Persian scholar and teacher and a living legend of old Delhi, died on Monday, August 29 at the age of 86 after a short stay at Apollo Hospital, Delhi, surrounded by his nephew Faridun, his niece Simin and other family members. An authority on Delhi and Indo–Persian literature and author of influential text editions of Persian historians and poets who wrote during the reign of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (1628–58), Dr. Jaffery taught Persian at the Anglo-Arabic School of Zakir Husain College (previously Delhi College) until his retirement in 1995. His room, his hujra in the historical building of the madrasa of Ghaziuddin in which the Anglo-Arabic School is situated outside Ajmeri Gate became a place of pilgrimage for an international community of scholars, writers, students, and journalists who sought to study classical Persian, acquire knowledge on the history and culture of old Delhi and the Mughals, sought a rare publication in his library, or who just wanted to meet the famous Dr. Jaffery, who had been the guide of William Dalrymple to his “City of Djinns.”

Patricia Romero was born on 28 July 1934 and raised in Ohio. She earned her B.S. at Central State University in Education in 1964 while raising three boys. She chose Central State, a Historically Black University, both for its proximity and also, according to her middle son Arthur, for the “energy that was manifest in the burgeoning civil rights movement.” After graduating, she pursued her Master's degree at Miami University of Ohio in 1965, while raising her sons on her own and taking on a teaching role at Central State University. Ohio would round out Dr. Romero's education as she completed her Ph.D. in African History at The Ohio State University in 1971. She worked as a research assistant at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, in Washington, D.C., to which she contributed a volume to its series, I Too Am America (1969), and as Editorial Director for United Publishing Company. She coauthored or edited four books during those years about Blacks in America, including: In Black America, 1968: The Year of the Awakening (ed.) and Negro Americans in the Civil War (coauthor). She enjoyed taking her sons around and visiting family members near sites of the nation's capital.

John “Jack” Ruedy was an illustrious historian of Algeria, an inspiring mentor, a teacher of great gifts, the founding director of a long-flourishing M.A. program, and a man for whom principle was not a matter of convenience. A Francophile who came to the study of French colonialism in Algeria as the result of an impromptu sail from the south of France to that country while still a student. Jack then engaged deeply with the Maghreb, an interest and commitment that began with his book Land Policy in Colonial Algeria (1967), and ultimately culminated in the writing of Modern Algeria: The Origins and Development of a Nation in 1992. This latter book has endured as a seminal account of the theories and practices of settler colonialism in Algeria, often cited and serving as the springboard for much later work on Algerian history. His research interests in colonial land policies also led him to make an early and signal contribution to Palestine studies in a chapter, “The Dynamics of Land Alienation,” he contributed to Ibrahim Abu-Lughod's The Transformation of Palestine in 1971.

Farhat Jacob Ziadeh, founder and first chairman of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilization at the University of Washington, and a distinguished scholar in the field of Islamic law, writer, teacher, and administrator, died on 8 June 2016 at the age of ninety-nine. Ziadeh was born on 8 April 1917 in Ramallah, Palestine where he received his early education. After graduating from the American University of Beirut in 1937, he studied law at the University of London, receiving an LL.B. degree in 1940. For the next eight years he worked as a lawyer and Arabic instructor in the United States, England, and Palestine. In 1948, he joined the Princeton University faculty as a lecturer in Arabic. The following year he married Suad Salem, who, like himself, was also from Ramallah. They raised five daughters: Shireen, Susan, Rhonda, Deena, and Reema. In 1950, Ziadeh began working with the Voice of America in New York as the editor of the Arabic desk. Since this was a full-time job, he could continue as a lecturer at Princeton only on a part-time basis. In 1954, however, Princeton offered him an assistant professorship, which he accepted. At Princeton, Ziadeh collaborated with the late R. Bayly Winder to write An Introduction to Modern Arabic (1957). It was during this period also that Ziadeh began to work on his translation of Ṣubḥī Maḥmaṣānī’s Falsafat al-Tashrīʿ fī al-Islām under the title, Mahmassani's Philosophy of Jurisprudence in Islam (1961).