Sharīʿa scripts : a historical anthropology
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Sharīʿa scripts : a historical anthropology
Columbia University Press, c2018
- : cloth
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 481-498) and index
Text in English with some Arabic
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Map of Western Yemen
Introduction
Part I. Library
1. Books
2. Pre-text: Five Sciences
3. Commentaries: "Write It Down"
4. Opinions
5. "Practice with Writing"
Part II. Archive
6. Intermission
7. Judgments
8. Minutes
9. Moral Stipulations
10. Contracts
Postscript
Notes
Manuscripts and Archival Materials
Bibliography
Index
by "Nielsen BookData"