ABSTRACT
In Middle Eastern studies Islam and Muslims have become the dominant concern, almost obscuring many other aspects of societies and cultures in the past and the present. The current situation is yet another stage in a long historical development of a scholarly tradition which seems to be structured by oscillations, or Gellnerian pendulum swings, between interest in Middle Eastern languages and literature on the one hand and Islam on the other. Although Middle Eastern studies and Islamic studies are different fields of inquiry, with their own traditions, they are so closely related that next to cooperation and cross-fertilisation, tensions and trouble seem unavoidable.
