The Precarious Intimacy of Honor in Late Ottoman Accounts of Para-militarism and Banditry

Abstract

This essay sets up a dialogue between the self-narrative of an irregular cavalryman (deli) Deli Mustafa that recounts the campaigns he took part in between 1801/2 and 1825 and the corpus of Ottoman archival sources written about Kara Feyzi, an irregular soldier (sekbân) and bandit leader who marshaled a successful, trans-regional organized crime network that pillaged Ottoman Rumeli from 1793 to 1823. It does so in order to tell a larger story about how imperial governance came to depend on wide-spread networks of violence for defending and policing the Empire but became imbricated in their criminal activities during this period of Ottoman history. Together, Kara Feyzi and Deli Mustafa’s stories shed light on much larger interpretative and moral communities forged upon the same kinds of “texts,” narrative strategies, group experiences, exchange of material and symbolic resources, or simply a concept like honor woven throughout the narratives discussed below. This essay builds on recent historiography that revisits honor as a discourse that imperial officials, subjects, warriors, irregulars, and bandits all invoked in everyday relations as well as crisis. Rather than emphasizing honor as the mechanism of social organization in the absence of the reaches of the modern state as it featured in twentieth-century anthropology of the Mediterranean, this essay illuminates the ways in which the discourse of honor (and its relational components) mediated the integration of individuals, groups, and local communities into much larger entities such as trans-regional networks and structures of the state. As it will be argued, the reliance of imperial governance on the trans-regional networks of violence to police and defend empire resulted in a precarious intimacy that conventionalized the unconventional, insubordinate behavior of vast echelons of Ottoman society, making violent behavior a marker of prestige and masculine aesthetic—indeed an enduring legacy of the Ottoman past from Serbia to Syria.