^{#smrgKİTABEVİ} Rethinking the Late Ottoman Empire: A Comparative Social and Political History of Albania and Yemen 1878 - 1918 - 2003

The following is a collection of my work that spans a period of seven years. Much of the material has been taken from recent research and has been fused with older, outdated texts, some of which had been previously published. As a young historian the institutional support given to me over the years, both in terms of financial sustenance and intellectual cheerleading is vital. I am particularly grateful, therefore, to those who supported me at the joint program of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University, especially Zachary Lockman, Robert McChesney, Michael Gilsenan, Ariel Salzmann and Katherine Fleming, who in their own ways, put up with a great deal. Likewise, money from the Fulbright-Hays, SSRC IDRF, American Research Centers in Istanbul and Rome, and the ACLS has contributed to the provisioning of my mind and body over these years.

Many visits to the numerous archives cited throughout this book have provided me plenty of opportunities to benefit from the dedicated assistance of some staff members of each archive. I thank all of them. In addition to finding a relatively smooth path to the seemingly endless supply of archival material, the acquaintances I have made along the way has been most appreciated; both for the belligerent ones and the sympathetic ones. I feel particularly privileged to have made enduring friendships while conducting research over these seven years, and their presence in my life far exceeds any benefits I hope to gain from the publication of this work. I am particularly grateful for those few among my friends and family who showed concern and shared my pain over the difficult two years when war ravaged Kosova. I would like to dedicate this book to them, for their humanity, their sense of justice and willingness to appreciate another human being's suffering. Alas, I cannot do that.

This is not a book that does justice to the sincere love I have for my friends. Instead, this book is dedicated uniquely to the implicit goal I set out to accomplish when I haphazardly put these reformulations together. This book is not for my loved ones, but for those I believe are doing all of us a major disservice by taking so lightly their ethical responsibility as scholars and teachers. This book attempts to fire a futile shot above the heads of professionals who insist on narrowly defining the human experience for the explicit goal of "telling history." As futile as it is for me to reach them with this book (how many will actually read it) it is equally futile for them to represent human beings in their glorious diversity.