The Calligraphic State by Brinkley Messick

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. In 2009, he received the Outstanding Senior Scholar Award from the Middle East section of the American Anthropological Association.

Messick’s intensive readings of texts are supplemented by retrospective ethnography and oral history based on extensive field research. 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. Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 10114, 120, 122. 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”). Shari a Scripts reads a wide spectrum of sources in search of a new historical-anthropological perspective on Islamic textual relations. 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.īrinkley 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. Books by Brinkley Messick The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society Volume 16 Starting at 3.75 Sharia Scripts: A Historical Anthropology Starting at 60.78 The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society Starting at 31. 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.

The Calligraphic State by Brinkley Messick