He hailed from an Albanian family in Shkodra, and was much esteemed for his ability; at the time of his appointment as Kapudan Pasha, the then Austrian ambassador to the Sublime Porte qualified him as "the only intelligent and educated officer of the navy".

[2] From there the fleet moved to Patras, where it arrived on 18 September and disembarked reinforcements that allowed the local Ottoman commander, Yusuf Pasha, to break the Greek blockade of the city.

[5] The two fleets engaged in indecisive fighting off the western coast of the Peloponnese, but Ali, determined to avoid direct confrontation and thus risk the ships he had captured at Galaxeidi, was pushed back to Zakynthos.

[9][10] Ali tried to intervene and spare the rural population from destruction, and particularly the valuable mastic villages, as their survival was the foundation of the island's continued prosperity (and the tax proceeds it remitted to Constantinople).

[17][18] On 18 June, Ali held a great feast on his flagship, the 84-gun ship of the line Mansur al-liwa, to celebrate Eid al-Fitr and the end of Ramadan.

According to contemporary European reports, Ali's officers led him to board a boat, but at that moment he was struck by a falling spar and died soon after he was brought ashore.

However, the eyewitness Vehid Pasha claims in his memoirs that he was killed when the ship's gunpowder magazine exploded, and that his blackened corpse was thrown to the beach, where it was found.

[19][20] Ali's second-in-command brought the fleet back to the Dardanelles, while Chios, including the mastic villages, was ravaged anew by the Ottoman soldiery in revenge.