to be here with you this evening see so
many familiar faces and some many new
faces
I am honored to have been invited to
moderate this discussion and I wonder
what journalist wouldn't be thrilled to
have a chance to sit and pick the brains
of dr. Richard bullit and Sheikh Hamza
Yusuf I think this is a rather
appropriate room for us to be in to
discuss miss reading history Altschul in
German or Yiddish means old synagogue
and a synagogue is a place for worship
for wrestling with the soul and for
becoming educated and I look forward to
doing that with you and our guests this
evening now in my time at Columbia
University where I studied at the
journalism school I did not have a
chance either to study with or interview
dr. dr. Richard bullet so I'm going to
make up for some of that lost time
tonight I can say this that for the past
thirty some years he has taught in
Columbia University's history department
almost non-stop since 84 he's been
director of the Middle East Institute
here at Columbia University his
geographical expertise of the what we
call the Middle East goes from North
Africa into Southwest Asia southern
Europe and of course over to Iran his
spiritual expertise extends through the
Abrahamic traditions Judaism
Christianity and Islam although I don't
quite know to which one he ascribes yet
he is a time traveler his expertise is
also in Medieval Studies so from the
Middle Ages to today dr. bullet is also
a novelist
and I'm intending to read some of those
books his gradient critically acclaimed
non-fiction book I present to you here
the case for Islam Oh Christian
civilization well this is Islamic
Christian civilization and he argues
that civilizations of the Middle East
and the West should be viewed as sharing
common cultural traditions and I see
that as a rather daring
counter establishment counterculture
type of view and thesis and I'll bet
that you've got some stories to tell
about how people reacted to this
outlandish notion of an Islamic
Christian civilization and I hope we'll
hear some of those tonight ladies and
gentlemen please help me welcome dr.
Richard bullit
[Applause]
well thank you very much it's a
particular pleasure to be able to share
a platform with Sheikh Hamza and to see
this auditorium filled more than I think
I've ever seen it before I feel like a
I'm opening for the Rolling Stones or
something but in fact this is a
conversation and the format is that we
will begin the conversation with to
hopefully not too long-winded monologues
and then we'll move on to having a more
a more formal conversation so I got to
talk to you for about for about 20
minutes miss reading history is is not
the right title you can't miss read
history until it's miss written and I
think that the the crucial thing here is
the miss writing of history now I say
you can't miss read it because where do
you get your history you get your
history from ultimately from written
sources you may get it at first hand or
may hear stories from your parents or
friends something like that but it but
at some point somebody wrote down the
history and history is structured
according to master narratives master
narratives are those things about
history that have been repeated so often
and so confidently with so little
variation that they are taken to be true
and yet none of them are master
narratives are the the triumphs of the
historian everybody would like to invent
the particular story that then gets told
in every history book for the next for
the next five thousand years but the the
fact the matter is the master narratives
are invented by historians and the more
successful they are the less
people are inclined to question them and
yet they're continually being questioned
and they're being questioned in ways
that are effective so that if I can give
a very obvious example if you read a
history of Europe written before let us
say 1950 you'll read the standard
history of Europe - the women oh there
were no women in Europe before 1950 then
you go you move along and you get a
generation of really formatively
talented feminist scholars who are
historians they find the sources they
read the sources they write the stories
they publish the stories you cannot read
a history of Europe now that is not
teeming with women we need this in the
Middle East though frankly but the fact
of the matter is someone has to do it so
we have rewritten the master narratives
so the European history is now
co-educational European history is I
mean history my hometown Rockford
Illinois where I grew up in a Methodist
household just to I yeah so set your
mind at ease
in my own town I grew up and I knew that
there were two people who founded
Rockford Illinois one was named captain
wasn't one his name Blake I recently
went to the homepage of my town and I
found out that three people founded
Rockford Kent Blake and the slave of one
of them and suddenly black people
appeared because that's a new master
narrative at one time there were no
black people in American history now
there are so when I talk about the idea
of reshaping master narratives I'm not
talking about something that is that's
purely fanciful I'm talking about
something that is that is the bread and
butter of what historians strive to do
and right now there is a contest going
on to some degree in the question of
rewriting the master narratives of of a
history that engages the Muslim Middle
East and North Africa if not the entire
Islamic world and Europe primarily North
Western Europe in that contest on the
one hand you have a book like this bad
book just just published by Anthony pag
den of UCLA or USC UCLA
it's called worlds at war the 25 year
2500 year struggle between east and west
there's a book that the noted
but not very good historian Ephriam
Karsch describes as if you are going to
read only one book on the manichaean
struggle between this and what east and
west this is the book but that's the
master narrative it is to say not that
there is a history of Europe a cruft
Christendom and there's a history of
Islam but rather there's a history of
good and evil and you know don't be
surprised if I tell you that the good
happens to be the Christians and the
tradition that they established in
Europe and the evil the manikyam I mean
the whole note and I wouldn't have
quoted Karsch
using the word Manichean because i don't
think he's very good a storyand but in
fact pegged in himself describes Islam
as a Manichaean religion he doesn't
explain what he means this is part of
his singular style but the but the fact
of the matter is what he could he talks
about he says that his book had the
Genesis because he has a wife who's a
classicist and she saw a picture of
Iranians bowing down in prayer and it
brought back to mind the fact that
Herodotus had commented that the
Iranians bow down before the king she
didn't seem to be able to distinguish
between god and the persian king and she
said you know here we have something
that's been continuous since the days of
Herodotus namely the bowing down and she
said to her husband why don't you write
a book about the perpetual enmity
between Europe and Asia puts the words
perpetual enman enmity in quotes
specifically Herodotus's idea of the
perpetual enmity between Europe and Asia
what Herodotus meant was the Trojan War
you had Athens fan or the Achaeans in
general and right across the aisle
Aegean Sea you had Troy Troy was in Asia
the Achaeans were in Europe that was a
perpetual end when he he was talking
about but somehow it's now transformed
into Herodotus the time traveler who can
coin a phrase that will be true for the
for the succeeding 2500 years which he
did not live to see this is the sort of
effort to to recalibrate master
narratives so what this book is it's not
a history of worlds at war it's a
history of the European imagining of its
enemies there's nothing here
actually about the other side and in
fact the author and the publisher both
felt that it was unnecessary to have
anyone proofread the book who actually
knew any Middle Eastern languages so he
has this you know you every tiny Dutch
village name is correctly spelled and he
has a real tough time with virtually any
name from the Middle East but the but
the point of the matter is it's it's
it's taking the the broad narrative of
European history and recasting it as one
of perpetual war with the east now we
saw you know this is up not a big
surprise
Edward Sade my you know admired
colleague here at Columbia wrote about
this but he wrote about it in the
context of imperialism in which you
either had people who were acting as
agents of imperialism who are
unconsciously abetting imperialism but
here you have something I think that is
somewhat more more tenacious in other
words what this book tries to do is to
say that everything in the European
tradition has always been and forever
will be good and everything in the East
whether it's the ancient Persian Empire
or the Muslims of today will be bad this
happens to be one of the better books I
mean it's a good read piece of crap but
it's a good read in terms of style and
it's been well reviewed in the New York
Times in The New Yorker it will get a
bad review in The Washington Post if
they publish my review but I'm waiting
to see whether they actually publish it
now your trap contrast this with another
effort to to recast master narratives
which is my own book case for Islamic
Christian civilization the argument of
that book is that you know we don't have
two civilizations clashing we actually
have one civilization arising
ideologically and religiously out of the
Abrahamic tradition but also sharing
enormous similarities in peril
over the last 14 centuries and it could
and it should be written as a single
history and that that's that was my
master narrative I call it Islamic
Christian civilization
nobody would review that book it wasn't
reviewed by any newspaper in the United
States it's been translated into other
languages it always gets reviewed
outside the United States but in this
country it was not reviewed there were
reasons for this one of them was that it
struck me that there is nothing
absolutely anathema about people engaged
in in democratic or electoral politics
taking their religion as a guide in
those politics within the secular
establishment in this country there is a
self deluded belief that religion plays
no role whatsoever in the American
democracy even at the same time they
know that religion plays a powerful role
in American democracy but the idea that
somebody would say it's okay for a
person of faith to also be engaged in
the political arena with their faith
relevant to their politics that was
something that was considered
unacceptable and of course the other
thing was that Islamic Christian
civilization does not include Islamic
Christian Judeo civilization and I
actually wait I think all the way to
page 2 before explaining why I don't
include Jewish civilization is because
I'm not talking about the shared
scriptural basis in which of course I
would have included Judaism but rather
I'm talking about other aspects of
history largely having to do with the
institutions with you know
interrelationships with the issues of
cohabitation or a non cohabitation and
so forth and so on now book like that
instead of taking the existing master
narrative and tweaking it in a post-911
Manichaean direction proposes a
different master narrative in which we
say why don't we look at all this
together
and what would happen if you did that
and isn't really ridiculous the way so
many of my detractors seem to think well
in the first place if you read the
history the master narratives of the
history of the West the Middle East is
all over it after all Jesus came from
the Middle East the whole religious
tradition of the West comes from the
Middle East I mean so many ways Greeks
and Romans yes but also Mesopotamians
and Egyptians so how how is that handled
by historians well one thing they could
do of course is to say well you could
you could divide the Mediterranean Sea
with a vertical line in which you would
have to the east of the line all the
text would be in Greek and to the west
of the line the text would be in Latin
then you could say you have two
civilizations and they're clashing you
have the Latin civilization versus the
Greek civilization and you could show
that the Latin civilization regularly
and successfully beat up the Greek
civilization because the Romans
conquered everybody but they didn't
successfully impose their language Greek
continued to be the the intellectual
language in the East but nobody draws
that vertical line even though everyone
recognizes it why don't they draw the
vertical line that's because they say
we're talking about greco-roman
antiquity and so you hyphenate something
and you say okay if you put that - in
there hey it makes it all one and so
greco-roman antiquity antiquity it is
until the Arab conquests then suddenly
there's a horizontal line that divides
the north side of the Mediterranean from
from southern Spain and Sicily on the
south side met rhenium and that line is
considered to be definitive and yet it
is no more definitive than the
hypothetical vertical line that would
divide the Greeks from the Latins
what I mean by no more definitive well
first I mean that most of the people on
the south side of that line most of the
people living in the early Caliphate
were Christians
the majority of all the Christians alive
at the time of the prophets death ended
up under Muslim rule and over a period
of three to four hundred years their
descendants for the most part became
Muslims now it's understandable that
Christians at the time viewed this as a
absolute catastrophe because their faith
communities were taken over by someone
else and some of them became isolated
like the Armenians or the Georgians or
the or the Ethiopians others became a an
embattled remnant such as the remaining
parts of the Byzantine Umbra Empire
others embarked on a huge new campaign
to to Christianize parts of Europe that
had not previously been Christian namely
Germany Scandinavia Poland British Isles
etc Islam and Latin Christendom expand
at the same time that's true
Christianity six centuries older but in
their particular territories are
expanding at the same time and the
reason for the institutional
similarities between them is that they
share this great this great experience
of having massive populations over
several centuries join the new religion
whether it's Latin Catholic Christianity
or whether it's Islam so they have a
shared history of of expansion but in
the in Europe the expansion is at the
expense of polytheists in the Middle
East it's at the expense of Jews and
Christians and in fact you have a much
more peaceful expansion of Islam then
you have of Christianity although now
the opposing master narrative argues
that is
has always been militant and violent and
warlike where you know you don't want to
go back to early Christian history in
the West and ask who was being militant
and violent warfare and who are like and
for that matter there is no part of the
world bar none
that has as as intense a history of
almost continual warfare as Europe from
the time of the peace of August's in the
first century AD down to the current EU
era and European history in between
there's almost two thousand years of
nearly constant warfare by comparison
the Islamic world is a haven of peace
most of the time but nobody wants to
hear that that's not part of the master