Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Ali

"This book is by my dissertation advisor, Cornell H. Fleischer [1] , but that’s not the reason why I chose it. This is one of the most accomplished books ever written about the Ottoman Empire. It revolves around the life of an ambitious, interesting character. Mustafa Ali was born in 1541. He grew up, went to school and got his first position as secretary to an Ottoman prince during the reign of Süleyman. He was 25 when Süleyman died. So he was someone who was very much imbued with the ethos of Süleyman’s reign: meritocracy, the rule of law, and bureaucratic rationality. Mustafa Ali became a very frustrated person later in life because, like many others, he realized that the ideals of his youth did not correspond to reality. He gave voice to his frustration through writing. He composed a large number of works: histories, poetry, works on morals, etiquette, etc. He emerged as the voice of discontent about the loss of meritocratic ideals, about the failures of the Ottoman system to incorporate gifted people into it and the pitfalls of patronage. He also realized that some of the problems he dwelled upon might have started or already existed under Süleyman. This is a meticulously researched and beautifully written biography of a prolific intellectual from the second half of the 16th century, but also a terrific study about how Süleyman’s ideals and Süleyman’s legacy were seen and interpreted during his life and shortly after. The book also has sections about historical consciousness and history writing, the emergence of a bureaucratic identity and bureaucratic consciousness among these cadres of madrasa-educated secretaries. We get to see how a particular type of Ottoman identity—not only for the uppermost elite, but for other educated people, upper middle-class people in today’s terms—was ingrained in this particular period. Finally, in this study, we also see the emergence of critical voices within Ottoman society, or at least within the elite. This is a perspective that is usually lacking in traditional understandings of the Ottoman Empire, which see Süleyman’s time as its apex. Mustafa Ali started with that assumption but realized that it really was not the case. It was an interesting moment of awakening for him. The Essence of History is a book of universal history that also incorporates the history of the Ottoman Empire. It’s a very valuable work because it tells you how an ambitious Ottoman intellectual envisioned universal and Ottoman history at the very end of the 16th century. The introduction has been translated into English by Jan Schmidt. There are a number of other books by Mustafa Ali in English translation, such as his work on politics, his account of Cairo and its cultural life, a biographical dictionary on artists. Those are mostly for specialist audiences, but they are definitely worth a look."