Richard Bulliet
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Richard W. Bulliet is a professor of history at Columbia University who specializes in the history of Islamic society and institutions, the history of technology, and the history of the role of animals in human society. He received a B.A. from Harvard in 1962 and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1967.
Several of his books focus on Iran but deal also with the larger Muslim world, including The Patricians of Nishapur: a Study in Medieval Islamic History (1972), Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (1979), and Islam: the View from the Edge (1994). His books on a broader view of Islamic history and society include Under Siege: Islam and Democracy (1994) and The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization (2004). His book The Camel and the Wheel (1975) brings together his interest in the histories of technology, animal domestication, and the Middle East, dealing for example with the huge military advantage the armies of the Muslim Conquest gained from a simple improvement in the design of cloth camel saddles.
He is the writer and editor of books of more general interest as well, including The Columbia History of the Twentieth Century (editor, 1998), The Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East (co-editor, 1996), and The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History (co-author, 1997). He has also written several novels which draw on his knowledge of international politics and the Middle East, and is a promoter of the validity of comics as an art form.
Bulliet's scholarship is known for innovative use of historical evidence and for radical questioning of the assumed roles that technology, religion, politics and animal domestication play in human society. Like any outspoken scholar of a subject as controversial as the Middle East, Bulliet has drawn fire from various sides in various continuing debates: criticism of his qualified support of the 1979 Iranian Revolution; criticism of his views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as overly favoring the Palestinian cause; and the standard anti-Orientalist critique that as an Occidental scholar of Oriental societies, he cannot report on those societies without consigning them to the status of "other."
Bulliet's current opinion pieces on the Middle East, as well as his latest writings on animal domestication and "post-domesticity," are syndicated by Agence Global, his official agency, at www.agenceglobal.com.
External links
- Bulliet's address to the Dialogue among Civilizations (http://www.unesco.org/dialogue2001/en/bulliet.htm), United Nations, New York City, 5 September 2000
- Islam: The View from the Edge back cover matter (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/cup/catalog/data/023108/0231082193.HTM)
- http://www.agenceglobal.com/list.asp?type=2&id=2