ABSTRACT
The Orientalist perspective, according to Edward Said, has created the notion that ‘Islam does not develop, and neither do Muslims; they merely are’ (Said 1979: 317), and furthermore, that Islam is seen to be about texts rather than people. A couple of years earlier the anthropologist Abdel Hamid el-Zein raised a similar type of criticism (el-Zein 1977), in which he accused classical contributions on Islam within the particular field of anthropology for leaving out the ‘voice of Muslims’. He urges anthropologists to talk more about Muslims, and less about Islam; more about how Muslims speak, not only about how they act.
