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Islam: The View from the Edge by Richard W. Bulliet. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Pp.236, notes, index.
This book is vintage Bulliet. Short, stimulating and eminently readable, it is concerned with Bulliet's favourite subjects (conversion, education, urban growth, local leadership) and summarizes his view of Islamic history as seen from Iran. Animated by a conviction that the eleventh century is 'as, if not more, important for understanding the origin of today's political and social forces than the nineteenth' (p.12), it seeks to explain how a particular structuring of religious authority (i.e. the ulama) came into being (pp.4, 9), indeed how Muslim society in general evolved (p.179), all this with a view to explaining the present.
Though the readability of the book cannot be over-emphasized, its theses do not always convince, for three main reasons. First, there is something fuzzy about the central concept. In principle the 'edge' to which the title refers is a nongeographic, social space which 'exists wherever people make the decision to cross a social boundary and join the Muslim community, either through religious conversion, or, under modern conditions, through nominal Muslims rededicating themselves to Islam as the touchstone of their social identity, or recasting their Muslim identities in a modern urban context' (p.9). In practice the book is devoted to provincial Iran, notably Gurgan, Nishapur and Isfahan (with some perfunctory attention to Spain). Why these places? Bulliet is quite right to stress that most Muslims are descendants of the conquered peoples and that 'for the first two centuries the edge was virtually everywhere' (pp.8f); but it was above all in the garrison cities that converts joined the Muslim community and 'sought to discover what it meant to be a Muslim' (p.180), and it was certainly there that the ulama emerged. Bulliet retorts that Iran played a crucial role in the formation and spread of some institutions, by which he appears to mean the madrasa, furuwwa organizations and the like (p.11); but by then Iran was hardly an edge in Bulliet's sense any more. The edge only makes sense if it is translated as the geographical periphery, and Bulliet does at one point include 'relative isolation from the institutions of the centre' in the definition (p.169). But modem Islamists can...