The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures (By Richard W. Bulliet)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures by Richard W. Bulliet Bruce B. Lawrence (bio) The End of Middle East History and Other Conjectures Richard W. Bulliet Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. 132 Pages. This slim volume is a collection of 12 essays, spanning two decades (1998–2017), from the prominent social and economic historian of Middle Eastern/ global history, Richard W. Bulliet (Columbia University, NY). It is a mixture of professional rivalry, methodological advocacy, and sheer, unbridled imagination. As a genre, it would fall between biography and manifesto, its labeling, like its content, challenged by the broad gambits of information, analysis and, yes, conjecture [see the subtitle] that fill its pages, defying rigorous, or even minimally accurate, summary. The series in which it appears, the Mizan Series, projects a "digital initiative to encourage informed public discourse and interdisciplinary scholarship on the history, culture, and religion of Muslim societies and civilizations." Its advisory board includes Bulliet, and several other distinguished academics, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Excluded from the above statement of purpose is the term Middle East, yet it is the topic of the very first, mind bending essay: "The End of Middle East History." Like several other essays, it is framed as a retrospect, in Bulliet's case on a long, distinguished career of teaching Middle East history at Columbia University. But instead of looking back from 2013, when the lecture was delivered, Bulliet projects the terminus ad quem for his inquiry as 2009, i.e., the end of the 21st century. He makes a prediction that the [End Page 98] historian Marshall Hodgson had already presaged in 1968, 45 years earlier, to wit, that the Middle East was not the cultural center of the Muslim world, nor its demographic core1 but rather, as Bulliet declares, a moniker "constructed in response to the vagaries of western imperialism" (p. 15). In its place will be the dispersion of geographical identity for countries now lumped together as "the Middle East." By the dawn of the 22nd century, "North Africa and Turkey went with Europe. Iran went with Asia. The eastern Arab world revolved around a new axis running from Jerusalem to Dubai. And the world's Muslims found ways of leading religiously fulfilling lives wherever they happened to live" (p. 15). Apart from this prognosis, at once compelling and unverifiable, there is more than a touch of irony in the appearance of this book in a series dedicated to scholarship on Muslim "civilizations." The very term civilization comes under intense scrutiny in three of the most arresting, and also counter-intuitive, chapters. The most general critique of civilizational labor becomes the subject of the longest essay, nearly 30 pages, titled "Isthmus Civilizations and 'Sapient Paradox.'" It amounts to an expansive review of the book by Nicholas Wade (2006) which discusses the archeaologist Colin Renfrew's argument about the "Sapient Paradox." Exploring alternate paths of human development, Bulliet argues against viewing "the rise of civilization as a continuous and everexpanding phenomenon from the fourth millennium BCE onward" (p. 113). Instead, Bulliet urges reexamination of the legacy of foragers and their use of both the environment and animals without presupposing that innovation and creativity belonged only to those who developed urban environments. It is a similar contrarian argument that informs "The History of the Muslim South: The Hajj and the Recentering of Islamic Civilization" (2008), where he assesses the annual Muslim pilgrimage or hajj as a better index of Muslim collective awareness and communal identity than loyalty to the Caliphate over time. Earlier in the initial essay on "The End of Middle East History," he had also devalued the caliphate: during the twentieth century it ceased to be "the territorial focus of a worldwide Muslim community;" instead "in the twenty-first century, the Muslim community finally became as global in thought and authority as it long had been in faith" (p. 15). But the sharpest and most personal critique of civilizational history with a teleological, cultural bent, occurs in a further chapter titled "Critiquing Orientalism: Marshall Hodgson and Edward Said" (2017). This chapter in a further instance of irony is the published version of a background...