Methodists and Muslims: My Life as an Orientalist by Richard W. Bulliet (review)

It is difficult to pin down the central message or messages of this memoir by a leading historian of the Middle East. Nor is it easy to deduce its intended readership. Perhaps because so much of my own career parallels Richard Bulliet's, I was swept along both by its graceful style and its content. But can it reach beyond fellow travelers like myself? I am not sure.

Lurking in the background is Edward Said and his milestone study of Western scholarship on the Middle East, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978). It is a damning analysis, suggesting that generations of Western observers of the Middle East and of Islam have systematically and consciously denigrated the religion and its practitioners. Bulliet and Said, be it noted, overlapped at Columbia for 17 years but had little professional contact.

Bulliet bravely embraces the label Orientalist but defines it in much broader terms than Said. For Bulliet it includes the study of pre-Islamic cultures and religions and civilizations of the Far East as well as the Middle East. He also makes a disclosure that in some circles would be seen as retrograde: "I bought into the notion that my expertise, such as it was, should be made available to the American government and my fellow citizens" (p. 182).

The narrative focuses episodically on Bulliet's Methodist upbringing in Rockford, Illinois, and how by sheer luck he drifted to Harvard and Oriental studies. "I have never had a plan, or at least none that took priority over things that happened serendipitously" (p. 71). Serendipity is great good luck. Charles Issawi described it as someone looking for a needle in a haystack and finding the farmer's daughter. It doesn't fit well in Said's analysis.

The reader may be disappointed that Methodism receives far less attention than Orientalism. Bulliet's earliest scholarly contribution was Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History (Harvard University Press 1972), and he notes some resemblance between the Methodist community of 20th century Rockford and 11th century Nishapur (in present-day Iran). He casts his analogic net even wider to compare Illinois and Arabia, claiming "a shared history of religious revival and puritanism" (p. 175), a comparison that strikes me as intriguing but strained.

He is much more thorough and convincing in his analysis of the conjoined fields of Orientalism and Middle Eastern studies. He was an active player in both at Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia. The former grew out of European scholarship on Islam and the Middle East, while the latter was a product of the United States in the Cold War; an attempt to build academic expertise on the languages and peoples being wooed by the Soviet Union. The result was, in Bulliet's view, academic mediocrity. The Orientalists/Middle East experts did not enjoy legitimacy in the eyes of mainline disciplines (history and the social sciences) and made no significant contributions to them. With the rare exceptions of scholars such as Clifford Geertz (anthropology) and Pierre Bourdieu (sociology), hardly any had disciplinary visibility.

Curiously, Bulliet does not pay much attention to the phenomenon that is changing this picture radically and for the better: the emergence of scholars from the region itself who need not acquire difficult languages and are familiar with local cultures (brief mention p. 186). They can leap straight into disciplinary debates and absorb relevant methodologies. This, it seems to me, has proceeded furthest in economics and political economy but also in demography and historiography. Such scholars cannot be easily tarred with Said's Orientalist brush. Despite this relative lacuna in his analysis, Bulliet does make a startling and related observation in his very last paragraph (p. 187) that much Middle Eastern and presumably other scholarship is now sponsored by think tanks rather than universities, and think tanks are much more the creatures of their financial backers. I so wish Bulliet had developed this important proposition much more fully. Likewise, his...