Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology - Hardcover

Messick, Brinkley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0231178743 ISBN 13: 9780231178747

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2017

Synopsis

A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Shari'a Scripts is a work of historical anthropology focused on Yemen in the early twentieth century. While colonial regimes, late Ottoman reformers, and early nationalists wrought decisive changes to the legal status of the shari'a, significantly narrowing its sphere of relevance, the Zaydi 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 shari'a as a localized and lived phenomenon. Shari'a Scripts reads a wide spectrum of sources in search of a new historical-anthropological perspective on Islamic textual relations. Messick analyzes the shari'a as a local system of texts, distinguishing between theoretical or doctrinal juridical texts (or the "library") and those produced by the shari'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. Shari'a Scripts also ventures a major methodological contribution by confronting anthropology's longstanding reliance upon the observational and the colloquial, seeking to develop tools for the anthropologist as reader.

About this title

Review:

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.--Paul Dresch, St John's College, Oxford

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.--Zouhair Ghazzal, Loyola University, Chicago

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.--Martha Mundy, London School of Economics

Skillfully recovers the practice of Shari'a law in the highlands of prerevolutionary Yemen.--Choice

Turns on its head a long history of assumptions regarding categories that have largely remained unquestioned.--Reading Religion

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).

About this edition

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0231178743
• ISBN 13: 9780231178747
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 512