Shari'a Scripts

Sharīʿa Scripts is a work of historical anthropology focused on Yemen in the early twentieth century. Brinkley Messick uses the writings of the Yemeni past to offer a comprehensive view of the sharīʿa as a localized and lived phenomenon in a groundbreaking examination of the interpretative range and insights offered by the anthropologist as reader.

Messick Brinkley :

Brinkley Messick (PhD, Anthropology, Princeton) is Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies and Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of The Calligraphic State (California, 1993), which won the Albert Hourani Award from the Middle East Studies Association, and Sharīʿa Scripts: An Historical Anthropology (Columbia, forthcoming) and the coeditor of Islamic Legal Interpretation (Harvard, 1996). I chose him as a reader for his interests in the theory and practice of Islamic law.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).

Martha Mundy, London School of Economics:
What would be an anthropology of an Islamic juridical tradition? Anthropology aims to describe the whole as lived. Hence the ambition is larger than the historical genealogies or analytical interpretation of textual scholarship. This book examines both the structure of the jurisprudential ‘library,’ using the techniques of textual scholarship, and the ‘archive’ of day-to-day documentation of life in law, situating documents in the practices of writing and orality. Such an undertaking is virtually unique: the late survival of scriptural practice, the living interface of Zaydī and Shāfiʿī traditions, and the political centrality of Islamic jurisprudence made never-colonized highland Yemen of the mid-twentieth century a unique site for such an anthropology. The result is a mature work that quietly destroys clichés ever reproduced not only by journalism (and political revivalist movements) but also by textual scholarship. There cannot be another like it.

Zouhair Ghazzal, Loyola University, Chicago:
Multicentury approaches of the sharīʿa have regrettably transformed law into a banal history of ideas without much connection to practice. Messick’s Sharīʿa Scripts instead takes the sharīʿa right from the economy of the local, that of central Yemen, and places research at a micro level. Historical anthropology makes possible the tracing of genealogical lines of power relations, and the depiction of narratives and discourses in relation to local practices. This book, which takes the logic of texts and their practices to new heights, stands out as a masterful contribution to sharīʿa studies worldwide.

Paul Dresch, St John's College, Oxford:
Sharīʿa Scripts 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 Kitāb al-azhār, Sharḥ al-azhār, and Sayl al-jarrār are read more closely than any Western academic has attempted previously. A formative and distinguished book.