Draft:Hasan Kaleshi

Ahmed Hasan Kaleshi (7 March 1922 – 19 July 1976), also known simply as Hasan Kaleshi, was an Albanian historian, orientalist, and Albanologist from Yugoslavia, a professor at the University of Pristina. His work primarily focused on relations between the Ottoman Empire and its Albanian population. He is particularly noted for his contention that Ottoman conquest and Islamization contributed to the survival of Albanian identity by staving off assimilation.

Biography
He was born on March 7, 1922, in the village of Srbica in Kicevo, where he completed his elementary education. He completed his secondary education in Pristina. During the occupation of Yugoslavia in World War II, he worked as a translator. After the war, in 1946, he enrolled in Oriental studies and Romance studies at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. At the same time, from 1947 to 1950, he worked as a translator and lecturer in the Albanian language editorial department at Radio Belgrade. He then worked as a teacher in a high school, and from 1955 he was an assistant at the Department of Oriental Philology at the University of Belgrade. He defended his doctoral thesis at the University of Belgrade on the topic "Oldest vakuf documents in Macedonia in the Arabic language".

In 1965, he specialized in Turkology at the University of Hamburg under the guidance of Professor Annemarie von Gabain. In 1967, he was in Cairo, where he, together with Kamil el-Buhayn, prepared a large Serbian-Croatian-Arabic dictionary. From 1967, he was a research associate at the Albanological Institute in Pristina. From 1970, he was a full professor at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Pristina. In 1973–1974, at his initiative, a Department of Oriental Studies was founded at the university.

Scholarship
Kaleshi is most well-known for his views concerning the effect of Ottoman rule on the Albanian people. Although the Ottoman period has generally been viewed negatively by Albanian nationalists, Kaleshi argued that the Ottoman conquest, and particularly the resulting Islamization, is largely what allowed Albanians to maintain a separate ethnic identity, rather than be assimilated by their Greek and Slavic neighbors. According to Fischer and Schmitt, this thesis represents a "Sunni counternarrative" to the traditional nationalist view of "Albanianism," which has tended to downplay the importance of religion (particularly Sunni Islam) to Albanian national identity.