Shari'a Scripts

A Historical Anthropology

By: Brinkley Messick

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Hardcover | 13 February 2018 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
536 Pages

Age
22+

Dimensions(cm)
23.6 x 16.5 x 3.6

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A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Shar??a Scripts is a work of historical anthropology focused on Yemen in the early twentieth century. There—while colonial regimes, late Ottoman reformers, and early nationalists wrought decisive changes to the legal status of the shar??a, significantly narrowing its sphere of relevance—the Zayd? school of jurisprudence, rooted in highland Yemen for a millennium, still held sway.

Brinkley Messick uses the richly varied writings of the Yemeni past to offer a uniquely comprehensive view of the shar??a as a localized and lived phenomenon. Shar??a Scripts reads a wide spectrum of sources in search of a new historical-anthropological perspective on Islamic textual relations. Messick analyzes the shar??a as a local system of texts, distinguishing between theoretical or doctrinal juridical texts (or the “library”) and those produced by the shar??a courts and notarial writers (termed the “archive”). Attending to textual form, he closely examines representative books of madrasa instruction; formal opinion-giving by muftis and imams; the structure of court judgments; and the drafting of contracts. Messick’s intensive readings of texts are supplemented by retrospective ethnography and oral history based on extensive field research. Further, the book ventures a major methodological contribution by confronting anthropology’s longstanding reliance upon the observational and the colloquial. Presenting a new understanding of Islamic legal history, Shar??a Scripts is a groundbreaking examination of the interpretative range and historical insights offered by the anthropologist as reader.

About the Author

Brinkley Messick is professor of anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies as well as the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (1993) and a coeditor of Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (1996).

Industry Reviews

This book explores debates within an Islamic legal tradition about the status of writing and thus of recorded truth. This is an impressive piece of work that draws upon the author's four decades of thought and reading. No one else can move among these Yemeni texts with such assurance, and classic works such as those of Kitab al-Azhar, Sharh al-Azhar and Sayl al-Jarrar are read more closely than any Western academic has attempted previously. ?A formative and distinguished book. -- Paul Dresch, St John's College, Oxford

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