The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bulliet, a history professor at Columbia University and a former director of the Middle East Institute, offers a short, insightful book about Islam and Muslims that actually provides hope for the future. The book consists of four essays arguing that Islam and Christianity have tremendous common roots and history—as much as, or more than, Christianity and Judaism. Bulliet also contends that Western Christian policymakers and commentators, when encountering Islam, have reacted with knee-jerk Islamophobia and generalizations rather than thoughtfulness. Bulliet envisions a future, 20 years off at least, where Islamic countries will have active democracies. He also debunks the popular view that Islam has an inherent separation of church and state problem; Christians have had similar issues in the past, as he shows with the Church of England and other examples. Bulliet's optimism—which is backed up by solid arguments—is alluring, particularly where his counterparts can offer only gloom-and-doom scenarios. Bulliet's most brilliant insight, which comes in the last chapter, is the recognition that those Islamic movements on the fringe eventually become the center of Islam. The new leaders of Islam—probably those on the edge now, who have shown more diverse, tolerant attitudes—have not yet been heard from, he says. Although portions are written densely, this book is a quick, informative, and encouraging read.
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Review

"Richard Bulliet's The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization re-examines most of the pieties of the West about the Muslim world and Islamic politics (and about the West itself) and finds them not only wrong but wrongly conceived.... He argues that modern European and Muslim history are deeply intertwined and that one cannot be understood in isolation from the other, thereby launching a profound challenge to teachers, historians and policy-makers." -- Juan Cole, University of Michigan, The International Journal of Middle East Studies

"[An] insightful book about Islam and Muslims that actually provides hope for the future.... this book is a quick, informative, and encouraging read." -- Publishers Weekly

"A clearly written book, aimed at the general reader...requires a place on the library shelf" -- Library Journal

"Presents a persuasive case for viewing Islam and the West... [a]brilliant new book" -- Emran Qureshi, Toronto Globe and Mail

"Seeks to bridge a gap between Islam and the West... His solution is to try to patch things up by emphasizing all that Islam and Christianity have in common." -- Daniel Lazare, The Nation

"As Bulliet writes... there is a far better case for 'Islamo-Christian civilization' than there is for a clash of civilizations." -- Washington Monthly

"Offers a rich lode of penetrating insights." -- L. Carl Brown, Foreign Affairs

"A positive and challenging proposal, underscoring the importance of the phases we use in defining our world." -- Future Survey

"Obviously, this is an important book with the important proposal to familiarize everyone with the term "Islam-Christian civilization". Let us take heed." -- Murad Wilfried Hofmann, The Muslim World Book Review

"It deserves the widest possible readership, addressing as it does with wit and insight one of the most freighted issues of our times." -- Malise Ruthven, Times Literary Supplement

"Bulliet's ideas are collectively imaginative and a major contribution... No reader will see the history either of Christendom or Islam in quite the same way." -- Ronald Davis, Domes

"Great scholarship and vision... Bulliet offers rare insights in the Islamic and the (post)-Christian worlds." -- Johannes J. G. Jansen, International History Review

"An excellent touchstone... this is not a volume that should be ignored." -- John J. Curry, Ph.D., Digest of Middle East Studies

"[A] wise and wonderful book." -- Howard J. Dooley, Journal of World History

"[These essays] emanate from a fair-minded approach to strident debates - written, if you will, from the center."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; Revised edition (September 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231127960
• ISBN-13: 978-0231127967
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #941,910 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How a common experience drove two civilizations apart, March 14, 2005

By	Carool Kersten - See all my reviews

In recent years media attention for the Muslim world has increased tremendously and many reputable scholars of Islam have joined the flurry of publications that is released month after month. With Following Muhammad -- a thoughtful essay on Islamic spiritual traditions -- Sufism expert Carl Ernst has attempted to counterbalance the torrent of books on political radicalism. Bernard Lewis, the nestor of Islamic history writing, took the easy way and jumped the bandwagon of Islam-bashing by rehashed his 1999 Vienna Lectures Series under the title What Went Wrong?

Partially in response to Lewis, fellow-historian Richard Bulliet of Columbia University dusted off some of the manuscripts in his archives and then elaborated further on these earlier musings. His The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization consists of four essays and, although the first one was drafted more than thirty years ago, they have been reworked into a remarkably consistent argument.

Refashioning that earliest essay, from which the book has taken its title, into a rebuttal of Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis, Bulliet explains that there are more similarities than differences between Christendom and the Muslim Middle East. The conversion processes during the earliest centuries shared many features; in particular the slow percolation of the new religions into the lower social strata. As contacts became more intensive during the middle periods, it is true that mutual hostility increased but even then peaceful exchange was more common than violent interaction. Only from about 1500 did the two civilizations go their separate ways, but - in an explicit rejection of Huntington - Bulliet observes that this was more due to accidents of history than an inherent necessity resulting from irrevocably different outlooks.

The second chapter "What Went On" is a correction of Bernard Lewis' negative assessment of Islam as a failed civilization. Bulliet attributed this misreading to the influence of 20th-century western history on Lewis' own worldview. Having been very much part of the effort against totalitarianism during WWII and the Cold War, Lewis fails to appreciate that a Muslim world fighting for independence from colonialism had very different issues on its mind. In his detached survey of Islamic political history, Bulliet consistently argues that, throughout the centuries, safeguarding justice and opposition to tyranny was the constant preoccupation of a religious establishment that tried to remain aloof of politics. When either indigenous despotic regimes - fashioned after the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe (!) -- or imperialist outsiders managed to take over the main power centers in the Muslim world this counterweight was successfully repressed. However, an unintended side-effect of the ensuing modernization efforts has been the rise of alternative `religious authorities' which have started challenging these political constellations.

The next chapter is more of a self-evaluation, in which the author critically examines the misconceptions that are still prevalent in his academic field of Middle Eastern studies. He illustrates this by critical assessments of three seminal works published in the first decades after WWII, when area studies were first introduced in the US. Tied up in the `development theory paradigm', scholars singled out only those congenial to this theory as acceptable representatives of and spokespersons for the Muslims. Those proposing alternative approaches to the challenges of a rapidly changing world, by drawing on the treasure house of their own cultural legacy, were greeted with suspicion and hostility.

Based on his own studies of medieval Islam, Bulliet extends some of the prevailing trends of that past into the future. In his closing arguments Bulliet shows that throughout history the most creative responses to the challenges, which the Muslim world had to face, came from `the edge'; meaning the often heterodox strands of thought and practices shunned by the power centers - and not infrequently emerging at what were also the geographical peripheries of the Muslim world. In our contemporary world, Bulliet sees three such edge situations that could become significant for the future: the `diaspora' Muslim communities of Europe and America; the democratically oriented political parties in certain Muslim countries; and newly formed institutions of higher Islamic learning. With regard to the latter, the writer specifically mentions Indonesia, where many Muslim scholars of Islam holding western degrees occupy key positions at Islamic universities and in the religious affairs departments. Interestingly, one of them is a graduate of Bulliet's own Columbia University. In his own writings, the rector of the Syarif Hidayatullah State Institute for Islamic Studies in Jakarta, Azyumardi Azra, has also stressed the important role played by Muslim intellectuals of the geographical periphery in shaping the intellectual discourse of Islamic reformism.

Bulliet's long-range historical perspective is a welcome contribution to the current discussions on the role of political Islam in the contemporary world, a discussion that has remained too limited in scope because of the myopic perceptions of those focusing only on the most spectacular excesses that have recently unfolded on the world stage.

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wisdom in a media of shallow polemics, January 19, 2005

By	L. F Sherman "dikw" (Wiscasset, ME United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Four chapters of this marvelous book deliver a strong, thoughtful, compelling message about understanding the past, present, and possible future of Muslim societies on their own terms. Would that pundits and media `experts' provide at least some part of this maturity. Bulliet eschews polemic and bitterness to provide sound perspective some of the most essential themes of public discourse and policy regarding the world of Islam.

The whole book is a compelling alternative to common (and shallow, ideological, Islamphobe) views promoted by Neocons and others. Whatever your present perspective, understanding will be sharpened by careful reading of this excellent book.

The only thing I do not like is the title, which makes a point but has mislead some reviewers already so that they dismiss or misunderstand the sound arguments presented.

The first chapter condemns Huntington's thesis about the "Clash of Civilizations" indicating how it is both misleading and damaging. (Bulliet might have added it has been used for aggressive, hateful, and misguided policies that obscure economic, oil, and geostrategic motives). Christianity and Islam as social, political, and institutional matters are "siblings" not clashing civilizations and excellent comparative analysis about responses to often similar needs are enlightening.

The second chapter "What Went On" provides much insight and more than the entire book with a similar title that has been widely promoted for those who want to think that they have answers "What Went Wrong". It is insightful and fascinating on topics ranging from expansion and conversion to the social and institutional place of clerics, law, religious hierarchy.

"Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places", chapter 3, avoids polemic while showing how area studies in the US provided a sort of revised "Orientalism" driven by triumphalist assumptions about democracy, development, and capitalism all the more biting (and ideological) because of the competition of the Cold War. Even now this has not been corrected to deal with things more objectively and with some degree of empathy.

The fourth and final chapter on the "Edge" analyses and speculates about the direction of development in Islam based on creative and changing situations that may become sources for broader future development - as they often have in the past.

Bulliet eschews blame and bitter argument and does not dwell on the sometimes negative aspects of Colonialism, intervention, anti democratic interventions by democracies of the west. Nor does he dwell on terrorism, putting it in perspective as presently exceptional and not widely supported. He is perhaps, if anything, too kind to some of those critiqued. (There is the implication that an approach based on `clash' and antagonistic policy ideologues who intensely dislike Islam - including Pipes and Lewis as well as NeoCons perhaps - may create more terrorism. This is a whole other discussion however.)

This is a short book (161 pages, Appendix, and notes) that will challenge readers of any stripe to improve their understanding, their reasoning, and perspective. It could well replace four longer books one might otherwise choose to read on these subjects. Attention is richly rewarded providing the mature and considered views of a thoughtful scholar that so clearly sets it apart from the many shallow books that have rushed to print since 9-11. Read it carefully whether your interest is history, exclusively current events, or speculation about the future.

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We Only Have One Planet, October 27, 2004

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

One of the few books published recently that seems to offer at least some hope for a peaceful settlement of the problems between the Islamic and Christian cultures. Unlike Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, the author says that we are not doomed to a struggle to the death, any more than the religious between Protestants, Catholics and Jews.

Written from the viewpoint of a historian accustomed to see the world as a process of change, the author sees changes occurring in both camps. He sees a more moderate, accepting view coming from the Islamic world, with the modern day terrorists and religious conservatives being not unlike the Christian equivalents.

This view is close to that I see from the few muslim people visiting here from other countries (such as Iraq). I have been wondering if their views represent a majority, a small minority, or are even just being polite to tell me what I want to hear.

Let us hope this author is right. Sooner or later, we all have to live together on just one planet.