Balkan Academic Book Review 21/2000
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Katherine. E. Fleming, The Muslim Bonaparte: Diplomacy and Orientalism in
Ali Pahsa's Greece. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1999. 206 pp. including index with six pictures. ISBN 9 780691001951.

Reviewed by Isa Blumi (New York University). Email: ngapeja@...
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The goal of this book is fairly straight forward: To raise questions about
how we read history in the context of a post-Said Orientalism and
demonstrate that "the assumptions of Orientalism were familiar not just to
the Western writers who employed them but also to the Orientals whom they
were used to describe." (p. 181) The subject is the enigmatic character of
Ali Pasha of Tepelena (Fleming uses the spelling variant of Tebelen) who
ascended to power in the Ottoman district of Yanya (author and/or editors
insist on using modern Greek parlance, Ionnina) at the turn of the
nineteenth century. Why Ali Pasha (who died in 1820) is of interest today
is successfully articulated throughout the book as he played an
instrumental role in the region's dramatic transformations and proved to be
anything but the conventional "Oriental, Albanian Bandit." Fleming clearly
shows that we must provide the analytical space to understand the actions
of the "oriental" in new ways.

Due to his importance to events at the time, Ali Pasha had received an
inordinate amount of attention from his European contemporaries and
subsequently by generations of part-time historians and artists who flocked
to the region. He has been the focus of biographers, playwrights,
painters, philhellenes such as Lord Byron who wrote his famous Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage based on Ali principally because he represented to the
European, all that terrified and seduced them about the Orient. Dr.
Fleming successfully stresses the point that this flood of material fits
very distinct existential as well as sociopolitical purposes, often lost in
post-Said work that tends to discredit such period pieces as oppressive and
thus useless. While on the surface, such orientalist literature is
problematic in its constructed, racist voyeurism, Dr. Fleming suggests we
should revisit the value of these works as historical documents to be used
by historians and not dismissed. She convincingly demonstrates the vast
body of literature produced on Ali was a reflection of the times and may
give us a far more comprehensive picture of Ali's actual role in early 19th
century European, Balkan and Ottoman events than previously assumed. In
Fleming's words, "Ali was a convenient point of intersection for all of
these preoccupations. From the philhellene point of view he was the
oppressor of the Greeks; from the standpoint of the Eastern Question he
appeared as one of the primary culprits for Ottoman weakness. If
geopolitically at times more powerful than the French and British, that
power could be overlooked or diminished through the themes and strategies
of the Orientalist tradition." (pp. 185-186) Indeed, as demonstrated in
the later chapters, Ali was almost universally painted as the tyrant,
barbaric "Turk" (or more suitably, the Albanian bandit) that was essential
to the genre of travel writing of the time. But as Fleming convincingly
argues, such aggressive use of Orientalist tropes may have been a
reflection of the relative weakness of the French and British empires
vis-`-vis this regional player whose military power and commercial
influence demanded diplomatic attention. Depicting him as a baseless,
subhuman bent on cruelty and abnormal sexual tastes was probably more a
reflection of the sense of inadequacies of an emerging Europe in face of
not only a formidable military force but an equally astute political and
commercial mind as well. Fleming effectively demonstrates how Ali Pasha
played off the rivalry between the British and French and (albeit not as
convincingly) suggests Ali Pasha actually used these negative images of
himself as a manipulative tool to further his own interests. (pp. 156-180)

The context in which we find Ali and his contemporaries is clearly one of
turmoil. The French Revolution and Napoleon's rise in Europe according to
many inspired the subsequent revolts in Ottoman districts which Fleming
lists as almost exclusively located geographically in contemporary
Greece. Here is where we find some of the history lacking in Fleming's
work. While not essential to her overall goal, it is nevertheless
important to situate Ali Pasha in a context that is more geographically
dispersed than Fleming has suggested The period is
filled with local turmoil and for the Ottoman Empire in particular, the
rise of such local personalities as Kara Mahmud Bushati in Northern Albania
(and Ali Pasha's chief rival) and Muhammad Ali of Kavala who establishes
his kingdom in Egypt, are emblematic to many of Ottoman "decline." The
fact that Fleming does not introduce Bushati's role at all, nor that of the
revolts taking place in and around Belgrade, suggests a shortcoming that
will reveal itself below to have troubling consequences. While Dr. Fleming
does a poor job of exploring this context, something which would require
far more archival research than indicated in her study, in the end, for the
limited purposes of raising issues with the general trends of history
writing this is a worthwhile book.

That said, we must return to the my criticism of this book for it is
central to how we are to write history of the Balkans in the future. Among
Ottoman scholars, much has been said about Dr. Fleming's lack of archival
research, in particular in relation to her assertion that she looked at
"only the tip" of the documentation on Ali and his career. (pp.33-35) This
is an unfortunate statement that only leads to dismissal from
unsophisticated scholars who do not see that the central argument of the
book is not dependent on the exhaustive use of archival material. The
consequence of Fleming's, unnecessary attempt to establish some repore with
historians who have made a living in various archives, especially the
Bashbakanlik in Istanbul, is that many historians will not take her book
seriously. To give an example, the fourteen Ottoman documents she cites
have little or no consequence to her narrative and yet are the central
focus of criticism among scholars who have practically memorized these
defters. The superficial citing of such a limited amount of material only
leaves her open to such silly critiques because there are hundreds of
documents on Ali Pasha to be found in Istanbul that could have added to her
central point quite nicely.

I raise the point here because, while it is clear Dr. Fleming is a careful
writer and does not want to perpetuate stereotypes and myths that distort
purposefully the legacy of Ali Pasha of Tepelena, her failure to indulge
more in the archival material leaves the author, editors and reader with
some false impressions. The problem starts with the title. While it is
clear that the so-called "Greek" war of independence, which took form
within and around territories Ali Pasha directly controlled, represented a
distinctive moment in the history of the southern Balkans, the unfortunate
and surprisingly uncritical application of anachronistic national
categories taints an otherwise solid study. The persistent
labeling of the principal actors in the region along national-ethnic terms,
for instance, completely distorts the nature of interaction of the
inhabitants of the southern Balkans in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. Fleming herself often points out that Ali Pasha was not a
"nationalist" and comfortably moved within the eclectic world of the
southern Balkans. Fleming even argues in the beginning that "a
study of Ali and the Ioannina [sic] of his time...provides a useful
microcosm of the religious, ethnic, social and linguistic diversity of the
Ottoman
Empire." (p. 26) The problem is that Dr. Fleming, and particularly the
editors who produce the Princeton Modern Greek Studies Series permitted
20th century national certainties to dictate the tenor of early 19th
century Yanya (Janina or Ioannina as written in Greek). Ali Pasha nor
anyone else in the southern Balkans at the time lived in a place called
"Greece" of "Albania" but such territorial distinctions are used
often. To persistently identify the inhabitants of the region as Albanian
or Greek as currently used speaks of a dramatic lack of understanding of
what is
at stake. The notion that there are territorially fixed cultural and thus,
ethnonational spaces in the Ottoman period conveniently forgets the wars of
1897, 1912-1913 and the subsequent movements of populations during and
after each of these wars.
The persistent use of contemporary spellings of city names, Ionnina instead
of Yanya (as it was written on official documents and pronounced) reflects
at another level, an insensitivity to the realities of the Ottoman
Balkans. Unlike what is implied by the use of modern place names and terms
of highly-charged political value (calling the region "Greek Epirus," the
inhabitants who were members of the Orthodox Church, "Greeks" or spelling
Argyrocastro for Gjirokastre in present-day Albania) speaks of an
insensitivity that borders on what could be equally "Orientalist" (i.e.
imperialistic) in a present-day Balkan context. I insist on identifying
the areas under study as Yanya, Salonika and Southern Balkans because
during Ali's lifetime. To speak a dialect of "Greek," to attend an
Orthodox Church or to fight for a particular army had no bearing on what
would later be essential for the inhabitants of the region: a national
identity. The inhabitants were no less "Albanian," "Vlach" than "Greek,"
their loyalties to ethno-national causes retroactively are positioned with
significance, at the time, Tosk Albanian was the language of exchange for
much of the so-called "Greek" national army during the 1820s. Likewise, as
Fleming points out, various dialects of "Greek" were used,
along side or often in lieu of Ottoman in bureaucratic affairs. Indeed, in
19th century Yanya, Ottoman business was largely carried out in languages
other than Ottoman. The persistent glossing over the fluid and complex
exchanges between people's of the Balkans
ipso facto gives countenance to the brutal murder and forced movement of
hundreds of thousands of people who lived in Yanya province before the
territory was captured by the "Greek" state in the 20th century. Fleming's
narrative fails, therefore, to engage in the problematics of nationalist
distortions of the past while attempting to raise valid questions about how
Western European authors deflected their own sense of
vulnerability by demonizing Ali Pasha of Tepelena. The incongruence is
troubling and suggests the publishers are producing books out of this
series that asserts a particularistic reading of Balkan history that is
distortive and just plain wrong.
Ali Pasha lived and ruled in a world that is completely incomprehensible to
the seemingly homogeneous "Greece" that nationalists would like to
portray today. But as controversial work of say, Anastasia Karakasidou
demonstrates, the naturalizing of contemporary national spaces does not
obliterate the 19th century. Salonika may be "monoethnic" today but 19th
century Salonika was a veritable melting pot of faiths, languages and
cultures that only "Greece's" conquest in 1913 and Nazi occupation in the
1940s could realize the project of purity. It is up to authors as critical
and potentially influential as Fleming (who is assistant professor for both
the History and Hellenic Studies departments at New York
University) not to permit the tools of silencing to enter their
narratives. Ali Pasha did not rule over a territory of "Greece," Yanya was
a province of the Ottoman Empire that was multicultural to a fault. Yanya
was only conquered in the 20th century and it is only then that its
diversity was forever decimated by weapons. One would hope that as we
begin to explore the idiosyncrasies of British travel writers and learn to
glean new ways of reading these texts we could do similarly constructive
work by untying the arrogance of the modern nation-state that silences the
memory of a diversity and complexity that it only on the surface has
successfully purged from reality.
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