Download PDF | Isa Blumi - Reinstating the Ottomans_ Alternative Balkan Modernities, 1800-1912-Palgrave Macmillan (2011).
273 Pages
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Nuk ndértohet shtépia prej kulmit. (You cannot build a house by starting with the roof.)
|e a typical nation’s story, the hero stands alone. Bold and assertive, his (invariably it is a man) singular act is to serve the nation, an unquestioned monolith whose place in history can never be retroactively doubted. In the case of the Balkans, a concoction of disparate regions and peoples, hero worship has become the stuff of academic legend.
Among the more prone to celebrate the hero are those who have learned to call themselves Albanians. Their story is especially emblematic of the lengths some will go to hoodwink peoples they expect to rule. Vulnerable to any number of manipulations, people who already concede the historical “fact” that they do share a common past have allowed their figurative “national home” to literally be built from the present backwards. I believe one photo alone best highlights the vicarious existence of such a “national” story.
There stands, on the cover of this book, the solitary act of nationalist heroism. At least as framed by a regime whose very existence, some 50 years after the event in the photo took place, rested on its ability to impose its present on everyone else’s pasts. Juxtaposed to the image the regime of Enver Hoxha (1944-1985) wished to convey as the Albanian nationalist moment is the actual moment captured as a photograph on November 28, 1912 (figure 5.1). This was a day, as far as the dictator’s regime was concerned, that could serve its foundational purposes only if the very context is literally airbrushed away. While Enver Hoxha’s regime was keen on airbrushing out an entire political class from Albania’s history, most of which ended up literally excised from national memory in the form of anticlerical vitriol, self-anointed “historians” have equally shunned any reference to an Ottoman heritage clearly evident in the photo.
Reinstating the Ottomans aims to return the people a brutal dictator erased from memory back into focus. In this book, the quintessential national hero of Albanian Socialist historiography—Ismail Qemali Bey of Vlora—will no longer stand alone on the balcony of a “modern” history with only the finger tips of his comrades left to share the glory. Qemali will share the western Balkans’ collective past with many others, all of whom, I argue, shared a common bond as Ottomans first.
Tam writing this book at a time when our often tragic recent histories, for those of us from the Balkans, Central Africa, the Middle East, and so on, are being rewritten in front of our very eyes. This time, the airbrushing is enforced by “conflict-resolution” experts secunded by the European Union or United Nations, who eagerly pay sociologists to cure our “ancient hatreds.” In face of yet another round of bold-faced manipulation of “our” varied histories, we cannot be victims, as we in the Third World are all complicit in perpetuating “ancient hatreds.”
I will speak especially about the kind of characters Albanians call burré/burra (pl.). I believe that such a term, reflective of the honor that is instilled in those brave, sturdy giants of rural communities— trimé is another term used in some parts of the Albanian-speaking world—best characterizes those in the region’s history who never allowed their “people” to become the sacrificial lambs of “higher powers.” These burra diligently served as guardians of their community’s dignity; the nature of their sacrifice became the source of local legend and constantly filled the pages of consular reports that can still be found in European archives.
Alas, these are the same burra who were most likely airbrushed out of history in the twentieth century. Symbols of a community’s ability to resist the ambitions of outsiders to take what was not theirs, the Prek Cali’s of this earlier world would never be allowed to inform the story of a different order, one that emerged by the end of 1912 at the expense of an older reality. Instead of those who would continue to defend the thousands of self-sufficient communities still in existence well into the twentieth century, we have been left with doctored photos and a house built on what was vilified, defiled, or simply ignored. Today, we have the sugarcoated stories of the likes of Ismail Qemali, a generic and entirely contrived “national hero,” sitting alone on the “nation’s” balcony, denying us any other possible history.
This book of questioning the predominant methods of reading and telling the past is very much also a book about the future. The spirit of mutual empathy and the celebration of “differences” that highlight opportunities rather than stimulate fear intermingle in this rewritten premodern story of the Balkans. I adopt this mantra because there is something distinctly modern about the violence of, first, the twentieth and, now, the twenty-first century. The “ethnic cleansing” that first targeted the weak and terrorized the collective seems entirely a modern phenomenon, one that all but airbrushes out of memory a more complex, mediated, and diverse Ottoman experience. I would like that complex set of earlier Ottoman experiences to once again say something about us, perhaps inspiring an awakening that once again feels that it is possible to act like burra. I believe that this is crucial for I wrote this book in the context of an entirely different fraud, the so-called war on terror, that has conjured distortions of our pasts, presents, and futures in ways that put the Hoxha regime to shame. The Ottoman story, if saved from our worst instincts, can remind us that there was once a different way for human beings of “different” faiths to engage the world around them.
In the process of living this book, I had the fortune to share the process with some exceptional people. First and foremost, my wife, Dardane Arifaj. I can only hope that some sense of accomplishment from this book’s completion compensates for all the time that it has taken from us. If there is recompense, perhaps it is the knowledge that it is because of the research that informs much of the book’s arguments that we even had the chance to meet in the first place. Te dua Daki.
I extend this love and thanks to my mother who made it possible for me after so many years of financial hardship to still be an independent young man. Without the world she created for me, I would have never had the wherewithal to take the risks that I did. In this same spirit, I broaden my love and thanks to my Kosovar family, whose open-hearted acceptance of who I am only reminds me of what I think was going on in Kosova for much of its history. Special thanks goes to Ardi for his energy and Visar for helping with the images and maps, a nearly thankless task only made more difficult by my failure to understand technically how he does it.
The research conducted to make this book’s central claim started many years ago as a fascination with the dynamics of modern identityformation. My skepticism with the notion that there is something “essential” about who we are took me from New York to Istanbul and many places in between. My years as a student at the New School for Social Research undoubtedly shaped most of this long-term quest. In this regard, it was an honor to have had the opportunity to work with extraordinary mentors—Aldo Lauria-Santiago, Talal Asad, Eric Hobsbawn, Ferenc Fehér, Aristide Zolberg, and Charles Tilly—while engaging the equally remarkable group of students these luminaries attracted to New York.
My nine years of affiliation with New York University produced another set of crucial axis of exchange that I trust have found its way in this book. In particular, Zachary Lockman bears much responsibility for my relative successes; I can only hint at what his kindness, generosity, and professionalism has done to set a standard I can only hope to replicate.
Research over the years in Istanbul was made possible by the contributions of so many. A special place remains for Ebru S6nmez who gave me so much. She will undoubtedly see her impact on this book immediately. There are many others who deserve special thanks for being a part of my life as I researched and wrote this book: John Curry, Aras Gaylani, Thomas Kiihn, Ryan Gingeras, Ayten Ardel, Nicole van Os, Jens Hanssen, Sabri Ates, Carole Woodall, Frederick Cooper, Ruth Ben Ghiat, John Drabble, Maurus Reinkowski, Stefan Weber, Sinan Kuneralp, Andras RiedImayer, John Chalcraft, Rifat Abou El-Haj, Stacy McGoldrick, Gail Kligman, Béatrice Hibou, JeanFrancois Bayart, and Florian Bieber stand out. For Edith and Josef in Vienna, Greg and Sasha in London, Ussama in Beirut, Ahmed in Cairo, Francesco in Rome, Bettina and Ka in Bern, Andrea in Paris, and Shawn in Washington, your hospitality and generosity helped me access the otherwise inaccessible documents. And those friends who go even further back, especially Steven Hyland and Michael Hamson, you do not realize how much I am grateful for you being in my life.
Colleagues and students at the American University of Sharjah and Georgia State University where I have taught during the writing of some of this book contributed greatly to both the delay in its completion and its inevitable improvements. I keep a special place for Joe Perry, Neema Noori, Bassel Salloukh, Richard Gassan, and Robert Baker for their friendship, great evening conversations, and availability for just about anything but reading the book. Thanks for nothing guys!
Miisemma Sabancioglu helped a great deal with finalizing the little details of technically putting this last version together. Casey Cater was most gracious with a last minute call. My new colleagues at the Centre for Area Studies in Leipzig also contributed to the finalizing of this book. I reserve my greatest appreciation, however, for Jon Schmitt. Once again this diamond in the rough proved to be my most important ally. The only colleague, nay friend, willing to engage with an open mind this very difficult book. I can only hope that this contribution will one day make for interesting trivia as his name is evoked far and wide in the halls of academia. The fact that this potentially brilliant scholar was once a “student” of mine makes me very humble (and grateful) indeed. Thanks buddy.
Ofcourse, Chris Chappell and his able team at Palgrave-Macmillan, whose interest rescued this book, deserve much praise. I especially thank Sarah Whalen for remaining patient as I tried to put this book together while in Manila. I also thank the readers of the early drafts of my manuscript for their helpful comments and demands for greater vigor as well as the personal interest in this project. In this regard, a special thanks must be extended to Noel Malcolm and Robert Norton whose remarkable patience and careful reading rescued me from a contentedness and complacency that was not warranted. I consider myself most fortunate to have had this book’s early revisions in their hands.
I acknowledge the professionals who helped facilitate my extensive research throughout Europe/Middle East. In particular, I thank the staff at the Arkivi Qendror Shtetéror, Haus, Hauf und Staatsarchiv, Centres des Archives diplomatiques de Nantes, Archivio Storico del Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Bundesarchiv (Bern), the Basbakanlik Arsivi, the Public Records Office at Kew Gardens, the League of Nations Library in Geneva, the National Archives in Maryland, and finally the Atattirk Library in Istanbul.
Special acknowledgment must be given to the organizations and institutes that have provided generous funding to help research and write this book: The Fulbright-Hayes Committee, the American Council of Learned Societies, CAORC, and the Social Science Research Council contributed generously to my research. Regarding the contents of this study, sections of Chapter 5 appeared in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East (CSSAAME) 21 (October 2001). I thank Duke University Press and the editors of CSSAAME for allowing me to reanimate this material here. Yannis Megas has generously permitted the use of images in his possession. In this respect, I also express my appreciation for the generous assistance from Robert Elsie and the staff at the Albanian Historical Institute/Instituti i Historise, Tirana, Albania, and the Netherlands Institute of Military History.
Finally, a brief explanation of the terms and spellings of geographic locations is in order. As this book’s fundamental agenda is to argue that there are different ways of interpreting events in the western Balkans depending on context and perspective, I have been particularly keen on demonstrating this by adopting terminology that reflects regional variety. In other words, I utilize place names and spellings, on several occasions throughout the book, that are normally not found today. I employ these spellings interchangeably with the more conventional place names and their spellings to highlight the fluidity of identityclaims and associations among people living in the western Balkans at an earlier time.
This especially applies to place names found in archival material. I will attempt to faithfully represent the place names when citing primary documents as they appear in the source. I choose to do this in the case of the Ottoman documentation in particular for another reason as well: Future scholars will have to know these spellings to properly research the catalogs in Istanbul. For example, the region and village that is known as Gusinje, Gucia, or Gusi today appears in the Ottoman catalogs as Gosine. The same applies for present-day Peja, which could appear as Ipek (Ottoman) or Peé. Even more varied are places such as Shkodér/Iskodra/Scutari or Janina/Yanya/Joannina.
This needs to be faithfully reflected in the book if my fundamental point about the importance of using terminology to accurately reflect the multiplicity of possible interests and associations is to be respected. To further make this point, I recognize an important regional distinction between peoples of the Balkans in the nineteenth century; normative terms such as Albanians, Greeks, and Albania and Serbia are not accurate for the period. It will become clear over the course of the book that there is utility in abandoning what I think are anachronistic terms linked today to ethnonational affiliations and selecting, instead, the local terminology individuals used to selfidentify in various contexts.
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