4squareviews

The following are notes from the lecture series done by Dr. Richard Bulliet for the History of the Modern Middle East course held at Columbia University (Columbia Course Catalog No. W3719) in the Spring semester of 2009. 

1.  Explanation of Big Bang-Big Crunch metaphor

The original title of this lecture given on January 22, 2009, was “The Big Crunch and the Big Bang Theory of the History of Islamic History”.   He plans on giving an overview of Islamic History in this lecture, and the “Big Crunch and Big Bang” are metaphors taken from cosmology.   The Big Bang Theory has to do with the origin of the universe, and it postulates that the universe began as a singularity which contained the potential for everything in the universe.   A potential of almost unlimited energy started an unimaginably rapid expansion from essentially a point to the universe of the present day.   The Big Crunch theory is less well-supported by current evidence, but it suggests that once the universe has expanded to a certain extent, gravitational forces will cause it to contract again, bringing it back to another singularity which sets the stage for another Big Bang.

The reason why Prof. Bulliet is using the metaphor to talk about the history of Islam is because there is a very strong predisposition to consider Islam as something that can be broadly described that has always been the same.   Therefore, if you know something about Islam, let’s say, the five pillars, or if you have read some verses in the Qur’an, you have an advantage in terms of understanding Islam as a whole.   In other words, there is a propensity for people to adopt an “essentialist” view of Islam, saying that Islam is essentially a religion of peace, or taking the opposite view that it is essentially a religion of terrorism.   The same things could be said to be true about Christianity—the tendency to express essentialist, summary views of religion is not restricted to Islam.   As an historian, Prof. Bulliet finds this unappealing because he thinks that Islam, like other religions, has changed dramatically in its 14 centuries of existence.   When you talk about Islam, or the community of Muslims, that is to say, those people who profess the religion of Islam, it is important to situate whatever you are talking about within the historical evolution of Islam.

Prof. Bulliet is going to focus on this historical evolution of Islam as occurring in 4 stages or 4 episodes of a singularity, followed by rapid expansion both in terms of substance as well as geographical extent, which is then followed by a retraction into a new singularity, which then produces the next stage and so on.   The singularities differ at each juncture, but the pattern is the same.

2.  The First Singularity

Prof. Bulliet states that it is important to understand during his description of what follows that this is Muslim belief, rather than something that needs to be debated in terms of provable, historical substance.   The reason is that he is really talking here about the self-conception of Islam rather than an external, historian’s description of it.  According to Muslim belief, Muhammad at the age of 40, more or less, around the year 610 or 611 AD, after a period of meditation in the mountains outside his native city of Mecca, he heard a voice which said, “Recite!” and that was the beginning of the Qur’an.   It is not literally the beginning of the Qur’an in terms of the text of the Qur’an, but it was considered to be the first revelation.  The revelation consisted of God’s word, which was enunciated in Arabic, and the totality of this recitation which comes to Mohammad episodically over the next 20 years, and which was not complete until his death in 632 AD, is what became known later as the “Qur’an”, meaning the “reading.”

No one who knew Mohammad or for that matter Mohammad himself knew what was in the Qur’an, because it was never revealed all at once.  If he had lived five more days, he might have had a revelation that would have changed things utterly.  The Qur’an has a last revelation, but nobody knew it was going to be the last revelation.   Mohammed lived in Mecca until he migrated to Medina in 622, which became the base date for the Muslim calendar.   The people around Mohammad regarded him as a vehicle by which God was making his word known to humankind.   They regarded him as one in a series of such vehicles or messengers, the first of whom was Adam but which included Abraham, Noah, Moses, and Jesus; these Old and New Testament figures were all considered part of the series.  There were some messengers who known only in the Arabian tradition, but who were not mentioned in the Old Testament, like the messenger that came to the people of Ād and the people of Thamud.  This sequence of messengers was a pattern into which Mohammad and his revelation were fit by the people of the time.  Why was it fit this way?  Because the content of the revelation told the stories of those earlier messengers, and presented Mohammed as a messenger of God whose message was a work in progress.

So nobody knew what the final form of the Qur’an was in its totality until Mohammad died.   The text was created within the next 30 years, put together from fragments of things written down by people who had heard them from Mohammad and which were arranged in a certain pattern.  There was another school of thought that it didn’t receive its final form until 200 years later.  That is a school of thought Prof. Bulliet doesn’t think is worth discussing in the class for two reasons:  1) because he doesn’t agree with it, and 2) it doesn’t really have anything to do with what the Muslims thought about their faith during the following 14 centuries.   The notion of this series of utterances by Mohammad, considered to be God transmitting his word to humankind via a messenger, constitutes the first singularity.   You could look back at the earlier stories, but the earlier stories were contained within the revelation, so even that becomes self-referential.   It’s a singularity, therefore, in that whatever Islam was going to be, started there.

In the next blog post, I will relate the first Big Bang, or expansion of Islam, from the singularity described above. 

Filed under: Uncategorized |