The second installment of Bwog’s ongoing documentation of Professor Richard Bulliet’s best lecture quips is here! Below, the venerable Middle East history don’s most amusing offhand remarks from the second half of this semester’s trial run of Islamo-Christian Civilization. The first part can be found here.

On course requirements:

“For the record, no one in this class is required to watch an al-Qaeda recruitment video, or go off and pursue jihad.”

“Graduate students might want to write something substantially longer [than undergrads] – that is to say, doorstop size. I don’t want to be able to lift three of them.”

On the International Islamic University in Pakistan:

“They had 740 acres…enough to make Lee Bollinger drool with envy. Of course, they had to level several villages.”

“It was not a great big giant madrassa. No one was doing calisthenics with kalashnikovs. It was kinda disappointing.”

On European perceptions of Islamic conversion in Indonesia:

“You might have thought that Indonesia was a less sophisticated society and that Islam represented a kind of Windows Upgrade complete with all the patches and things that still don’t work right.”

On being a grad student:

“What grad students read that is not assigned is often more important than what is. It was how I got my first introduction to “Sweet Savage Love,” a rape romance being sold in supermarkets.”

On being a grad student in the Ottoman Empire:

“Graduate students roamed the countryside in gangs, stealing or extorting money to stay in school. This is a situation we can all sympathize with.”

“If you had a graduate student who could not pay his way, this was not a problem; he could just be shot.”

On being an assistant professor:

“During [a senior professor’s] hemorrhoid operation I was the one who carried his doughnut-shaped pad to sit on in the lecture hall…being an assistant professor is not such an exciting experience.”

On Western operatives:

“In Arabic, [one British administrator] was called ‘the chinless one’ because his chin had been shot off in World War One. When he came to Harvard I had to pick him up at the airport, and he had two requests. The first was to find him the nearest outlet of the Church of England, the second was to show him a pharmacy where he could buy laxatives. The typical Englishman abroad.”

“The Bay of Pigs proved that the CIA was no more trustworthy than the USPS. These were the guys who couldn’t even deliver the mail.”

On World War One:

“There are movies, there are stories, there are histories – nobody agrees on anything. This also just so happens to be when the Armenians died.”

On terrorism:

“The terrorists of the 19th century threw bombs at carriages, not pizza parlors…now, I’m not saying the invention of the pizza parlor was lethal, although it’s certainly contributed to my obesity.”

Imitating an exploding stethoscope:

“Yes…I’ve come to administer to your hemorrhoid problem…boom!”

On a 1970s Iranian student conference at Columbia in which participants weeded out and booted agents of the Iranian secret police and the CIA:

“What kind of a rinky-dink university just allows student groups to kick anyone out?”

After discussing an incident in which a student killed a professor:

“I live at an undisclosed address.”

-CJS