middle east law and governance 9 (2017) 199-222 brill.com/melg © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/18763375-00902003 Field Notes ∵ Confessions of a Middle East Studies Specialist Richard W. Bulliet Columbia University rwb3@columbia.edu 1959 As I started my sophomore year at Harvard, my goal was to learn everything about something I knew nothing about: the Middle East. Why? Because my stock-in-trade in high school had been my hoard of obscure information about history. The more obscure, the better. Someone advising freshmen on choosing a major had remarked that very few people knew Arabic. (Except for Arabs, of course, but who cared anything about them?) So instead of studying the medi- eval history of Europe as I had planned, I decided to study the medieval history of whoever the Arabs were. There was something inconsistent about studying the Middle East from the very start, a chasm between how the contemporary scene and the early cen- turies of Islam were approached, and virtually no concern, beyond political chronicling, for the middle period between roughly 1200 and 1800. I enrolled in two year-long lecture courses, one called Islamic Institutions and the other a survey of the Middle East covering the geography, anthropology, econom- ics, religion, and history of all periods from ancient to modern times. A young professor of comparative religion, Robert Bellah, taught the former course and shocked the classroom on day one by announcing that the two required books would be the recently translated Muqaddima of Ibn Khaldun and La cité mu- sulmane by a French priest named Louis Gardet. “Is there anyone who does not read French?” No hands went up—Harvard pretense precluded confessing ignorance—but a lot of students did not show up for the second class. And I