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

"A detailed study of the production, transmission, and transformation of scriptural judicial knowledge among Yemeni scholars, judges, and other legal figures." - Journal of the American Oriental Society

"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

"A complex and sophisticated book, one that provides important insights into Islamic jurisprudence and legal practice and forces the reader to think carefully about how these might (or should) be understood and explored." - Islamic Law and Society

"In this monumental work, Brinkley Messick presents a richly detailed explication of a ground-breaking approach to the study of the textual traditions of shari'a, combining nuanced ethnography of locally contextualized practices of writing
and reading with a sharp critical engagement with the work of philologists and historians of Islamic law and society." - Journal of Islamic Studies

"This book is an outstanding achievement that takes the historical and anthropological dimensions of shar¯ıʻa practice seriously" - Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"Sharīʿa Scripts is a work of tremendous erudition and imagination that provides a veritable roadmap for a new anthropology of Islamic law. It is bound to become required reading for scholars, students and the general public interested in understanding the inner workings of legal praxis in an authentic Muslim society." - Cahiers de'etudes africaines