ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the study of Islam and Muslim societies did not attract the first anthropologists, who preferred to focus on Native American, African and Polynesian societies. In fact, anthropological studies of Islam were not immune from interest-based relationships with colonial powers. The first studies of Muslim societies developed within the French Ethnologie, which mainly focused on the French colonies, such as Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco (also called Maghreb). The anthropology of Islam is not theology. This means going beyond the question of Islam or Islams, and observing the dynamics of Muslim lives expressed through their ideological and rhetorical understanding of their surrounding (social, natural, virtual) environment. Yet many events have changed the relationship between the Muslim and non-Muslim world since Geertz wrote his seminal book Islam Observed, and Asad (1986b) reopened the debate on the idea of an anthropology of Islam which el-Zein (1977) had started.
