Shari'a Scripts

A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Shara Script**s is a work of historical anthropology focused on Yemen in the early twentieth century. Therewhile colonial regimes, late Ottoman reformers, and early nationalists wrought decisive changes to the legal status of the shara, significantly narrowing its sphere of relevancethe 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 shara as a localized and lived phenomenon. Shara Script**s reads a wide spectrum of sources in search of a new historical-anthropological perspective on Islamic textual relations. Messick analyzes the shara as a local system of texts, distinguishing between theoretical or doctrinal juridical texts (or the "library") and those produced by the shara 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, Shara Scripts is a groundbreaking examination of the interpretative range and historical insights offered by the anthropologist as reader.

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