“La culture arabe médiévale est une culture d'élite, done de classe”, wrote a student of medieval Arabic literature in the late seventies. It was statements of this sort, or presumably more the general character of works written in the field of Islamic studies, which led Ernest Gellner, about the same time, to the observation that orientalists – as opposed to anthropologists – being at home with texts, naturally tend to see Islam “from above”, not “from below”. Almost twenty years later, and after a generation of scholars tracing histories “from below”, Gellner's statement about orientalists still retains its validity. From the vantage point of the early nineties, two qualifications should be made, however.

First, there has been, at least since the turn of our century, an unsteady current even within orientalism of writing on topics related to popular culture. Already one hundred years ago the towering Ignaz Goldziher wrote on the “cult of saints” in Islam as an expression of popular religion. Of the works written in recent years one should mention Bosworth's painstaking study of the jargon of the medieval Islamic “underworld”; Memon's analysis of Ibn Taymiyya's critique of popular Islam; and parts of Langner's doctoral dissertation on folklore (Volkskunde) in Mamluk Egypt, especially her chapter on customs associated with Islamic holidays. These names certainly do not exhaust the important work which has been done by historians on the culture of “ordinary” Muslims.