A funeral prayer was performed for Akarlı at noon at Şakirin Mosque in Üsküdar. Akarlı's body was buried in the family cemetery in Karacaahmet Cemetery.
In his statement to AA correspondent before the funeral, Akarlı's older brother, Hüseyin Akarlı, said that his brother lived a life devoted to science and that they were 16 years old.
Stating that his brother surpassed him with his knowledge, Hüseyin Akarlı said, "He was a very faithful person and devoted himself to science. He was a valuable teacher. The King of Jordan sent him to Berlin with a scholarship to write a book on the Middle East. He was taking things from the archives and reading them that no one else could read. He received the Presidential Culture and Art Grand Prize. He raised a lot of students. He left a mark everywhere. I miss him very much." he said.
"He was a man of science, he was always principled"
Historian writer Hakan Erdem stated that he met Akarlı in 1979, when Akarlı was teaching at Boğaziçi University, and said, "He was a scientist, he was always principled. He stayed in America for many years. Our relationship has never been interrupted. He came and visited while I was in England. We met until recently. He was my beloved teacher, my brother. He is an irreplaceable person. A great loss for Turkey. He did great things, left great works. God willing." May he have mercy on him." he said.
Stating that Akarlı has accomplished important works in the fields of law, Islamic law and legal history, Erdem particularly drew attention to Akarlı's work titled "The Long Peace".
Erdem explained that in this work, Akarlı deals with the autonomous administration established in Lebanon during the Ottoman period and the peaceful environment in which different faith groups lived together, and that the work offers a different perspective on the recent history of Lebanon.
Ahmet Davutoğlu, one of the former prime ministers who attended the funeral, said that they had known Akarlı since their university years and added:
"He was a person whom we witnessed as a good person, a good Muslim. No one ever witnessed him lying. No one ever witnessed him knowingly hurting people out of the blue. Even though he worked in an extremely sensitive field such as historiography, no one ever witnessed him distorting history or leading people to wrong things. He was a very good person, a good Muslim whose words were trustworthy, an academician and a scientist with extremely high scientific loyalty who expressed truth and justice everywhere."
Prof. Dr. Engin Deniz Akarlı's biography
Akarlı, who was born on September 26, 1945 in Eskişehir, graduated from Robert College, Department of Business Administration and Economics in 1968.
Akarlı, who received his master's degree in history from the University of Wisconsin, completed his doctorate on Middle Eastern history at Princeton University in 1976.
Akarlı, who started his academic career at Boğaziçi University, worked there between 1976-1983.
Then Jordan Yarmouk University and Washington University St. The historian, who works in St. Louis, started working at Brown University in 1996 and taught there until his retirement in 2012.
Akarlı, who also worked at Istanbul Şehir University, was the dean of the university's Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
Akarlı's work "The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, 1861-1920", published in 1993, was awarded the Best History Book Award by the Missouri Historical Society.
The historian received the Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Prize in 2014 for his work in the field of Ottoman history.
Akarlı, known for his academic studies on the Ottoman Empire, law, economics and Middle Eastern history, donated most of his library to the Science and Art Foundation in March 2026.
