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Let me start with an age-old question: What is the good life? For Greta, whose
grandparents emigrated from eastern Europe to New York, it incorporates deep
concerns for oppressed minorities, a moral compulsion to take part in social and
political activism to correct injustices, and a lively suspicion of entrenched political
and economic elites and the overt and covert power they wield.
The Rockford of my childhood, a staunchly Republican industrial city in
northern Illinois, knew little of these sentiments. To the best of my recollection, no
one in my extended family felt sympathy with either minorities or the poor, and no
one questioned the virtues of a capitalist economy. Instead, my parents and relatives
were deeply concerned with family circumstances, particularly regarding higher
education. They had grown up under the strictures of traditional Methodist
discipline: no alcohol, no smoking, no dancing, no card playing, no gambling, no
lewdness, no blasphemy, and regular attendance at church. These rigidities
gradually fell away during my childhood as Methodist discipline softened, but they
shaped the lives of the older generation and hence my life as well. To this day I do
not smoke, seldom drink, wear no jewelry, and feel uncomfortable in bars.
(Blaspheming is another matter. Plenty of that.)
Yet an influential counter-discourse in my life challenged the Puritanism of
the Methodist social and moral order, though without adopting Gretas alternative of
social activism and concern for the oppressed. Clarence Joseph Bulliet, C. J., my
fathers father, lived in Chicago, away from his wife and son in southern Indiana, and
gained substantial renown as a newspaper art critic championing modernism and
attacking the academic painting and genteel Impressionism that passed as fine art
among Chicagos social elite. In Chicago he earned a reputation for mildly louche
bohemianism, but he continued to describe himself to down home acquaintances as
a country-jake from Corydon, the small southern Indiana city he grew up in.
C. J.s contrarian take on the world was less in evidence in his several books
on art than in his 1928 book Venus Castina: Famous Female Impersonators Celestial
and Human, a lively and pioneering compilation of lore about cross-dressers,
castrati, Shakespearean boy actors playing female roles, and the vaudeville star
Julian Eltinge, who made a drag career of mocking the pretensions and manners of
society women. The introductory chapter sets the books tone:
C. J.s precocious discourse on what are now deemed LGBT gender issues
contained few anecdotes that could plausibly be attributed to feminine souls locked
up in male bodies. At a personal level, he was more engaged with what he saw as
gender role changes in the post-World War I generation.
Venus Castina was illustrated by Alexander King, a young artist who in old
age enjoyed brief notoriety as a television raconteur. His drawings are rather
tasteless, but they are far from obscene. Nevertheless, C. J.s wife, my grandmother
Katharine Adams, had her personal copy of the book bound without illustrations,
and C. J.s copy included a decidedly homosexual original watercolor sketch by King.
As for my fathers copy, C. J. didnt present one to his college-student son until five
years after its publication, by which time Jack had married, and within a few months
lost his wife to illness.
My father Leander Jackson Bulliet, who was an electrical engineer for a
machine tool company, often expressed the conviction that his dad disrespected him
because his natural bent was toward science and technologyas he put it, being a
blacksmith with dirty fingernailsinstead of the arts. Possibly that was so, but I
believe C. J. may have harbored a low opinion of his son, whom he lived with only
seasonally for most of his childhood, for a different reason. I suspect he saw him as
exactly the sort of mother-dominated, woman-fearing, puritanical, neurotic,
unmanly Methodist maleI am projecting here my guess at C. J.s hypothetical
appraisalthat he saw as the product of post-war national degeneration. (He might
have thought the same of me if he hadnt died when I was only twelve.) Yet despite
feeling that his father did not esteem him, Jack and the rest of the family spoke of C.
J. with reverence and deference since he was much in the public eye and highly
regarded as an art expert. Jacks frequently expressed view was that his greatest
achievementvarious inventions and patents notwithstandingwas passing on the
DNA that made me, in his opinion, C. J.s intellectual and authorial reincarnation.
Everything that Rockford had taught me about how to lead a good and
proper life had come under challenge from day one at Harvard College. The people I
chose to associate with seemed like members of an alien tribe that I was studying
through participant observation: the Mozart-besotted roommate whose father
commanded the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the eccentric guitar-playing son of a Harvard
scientist waiting for his Nobel Prize, the Jewish biker who as the son of an American
UN employee had attended high school in Madras and could curse in Tamil, a good-
old-cowboy in the making from Oklahoma who claimed he came to Harvard because
he was rejected by Oklahoma University, the velvet-voiced scion of the owner of a
black insurance company in Virginia, a super-macho half-Indian poet from west
Texas, the list goes on . If I had wanted to associate with people like myself, I could
have. But with one or two exceptions, I didnt want to.
Only in my senior year did I begin to value my Midwestern roots. That
revaluing was still under way a few years later, when I began to imagine the
patrician families of eleventh-century Nishapur. Partly because of being married to
Lucy, who came from a social background much like mine, but with Tennessee
parental roots instead of Illinois, I began to think that maybe Rockford and the Court
Street Methodist Church werent so bad after all.
What struck me most strongly about Nishapur was its cohesiveness and
identity as an urban society largely unconnected with any broader political or
geographical entities. Like the Rockfordians I grew up with, the Nishapuris seemed
to live normal and sedate lives, draw their sustenance and their feelings of worth
from their local community, strive to the best of their abilities to keep at arms
length the warlords that vied to add Nishapur to their domains, and quarreled
among themselves over matters that were rooted in their learning and their
religious views rather than imperial or ethnic contention.
Was I wrong in unconsciously assimilating the Nishapur I imagined to the
Rockford that I grew up in? How could I not be wrong? I hadnt been alive in the
eleventh century. I wasnt Iranian. I wasnt Muslim. The once-great physical city had
become a deeply buried field of ruins. All I had to go on was my imagination, my
own life experience, and an array of textual sources that had almost nothing explicit
to say about the areas of social life that interested me most.
Was this Orientalism? Of a sort, yesinsofar as I was a young American
scholar cobbling together a construction of a medieval Iranian community that I had
no connection with. But it was an Orientalism that had nothing to do with the
Other, much less with denigrating non-Europeans, justifying imperialism, and
wallowing in exoticism.
Political life
Muslim students from abroad have occasionally told me of their shock at the
boastfulness of Americans running for elective office. Why, they have argued, should
anyone vote for a politician who has the gall to say that he or she is THE BEST? In
some religious circles, serious consideration is given to a hadith that declares that
one should not seek leadership. Leadership that is gained by campaigning, according
to the Prophet, puts the burden of success solely on the person selected; but God
will assist the person to whom leadership comes unbidden. Simplistic and nave as
this may be in a democratic system, there is no question but that boastfulness and
expensive, non-stop campaigning have diverted American elections from choosing
the most capable candidates for office. I sympathize with Muslim thinkers who have
tried to limit the campaign period and equalize the resources of contenders for
office.
I once had a conversation with former Vice-President Walter Mondale in
which I suggested that a measure of humility and modesty might be a welcome
quality in a candidate. Despite his own measured political persona, he thought my
suggestion bizarre. But the election of Donald Trump has shown us how absurd the
pursuit of office solely for ego-gratification can become.
Wealth
Geographic identity
Modesty
I found Muslim traditions particularly appealing in this area, probably
because my father drummed into me over and over again that self-promotion was
the worst of human behaviors. In the absence of real estate developers dictating that
every house in a neighborhood should sit on a quarter-acre lot with a fifty-foot
setback from the street, the rich and poor of Nishapur often resided in the same
neighborhoods. But prosperity was displayed within ones house or walled
courtyard rather on the public way. Similarly, both womens and mens outdoor
costumes covered pretty much everything and varied little except in the quantity
and quality of the fabrics utilized. It was expected, of course, that political grandees
and their acolytes would openly display great wealth, but this was not the way of the
patrician religious elite.
A favorite genre of light reading dealt with conmen and schemers taking
advantage of the pride the patricians took in their piety and learning. American cons
revolving around the hope of making a fortune out of a tiny investment did not
figure in this literature. Instead people chuckled at tales of fake Jews who would
pretend to convert to Islam in return for financial inducements, and then repeat the
act in the next town down the road. Or they read about a hell-fire preachera
Muslim Elmer Gantrywho collected fat fees from pious sinners and then moved on
to the next gullible assembly.
Among the people I found most appealing in Nishapur were the Malamatis.
These were Muslims who had drunk deeply of the doctrine that open manifestations
of piety were indistinguishable from acts of pride and vainglory. So they kept their
piety to themselves, although stories about who they were leaked out anyhow. Top-
lofty detractors who felt that the Malamatis would go so far as to flout the religious
lawcopulate like dogs in the street!to conceal their inner piety eventually
destroyed their reputation as praiseworthy Muslims, but I find them appealing, just
as I do the Malamati sentiments underlying St. Bernard of Clairvauxs Steps of
Humility and Pride.