Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology.

• Author: Berger, Maurits S.
• Position: Book review

Sharfa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology. By BRINKLEY MESSICK. New York: COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2018. Pp. ix + 519. $70, [pounds sterling]58.95.

The term "Sharia" has become trendy in the West. Until just over a decade ago, Western scholarship would speak of Islamic law, but today "Sharia," with its ominous references to practices of the Taliban and ISIS, is common parlance among politicians, policymakers, and the general public. What has prompted academics to take up this term as well? For one, the term serves commercial goals, such as selling books or obtaining research grants. But some scholars find that "Sharia" is more fitting than "Islamic law" because the latter is a term confined to typical positivist legal matters called fiqh, while Sharia encompasses the wider domain of divine commandments and all its judicial elaborations, of which its rules are only a part.

Brinkley Messick's Sharfa Scripts, a detailed study of the production, transmission, and transformation of scriptural judicial knowledge among Yemeni scholars, judges, and other legal figures, is situated in this larger framework of Sharia. The title is therefore an apt summary of the book's contents. This study will not directly appeal to lawyers interested in the mechanism of making and applying Islamic rules, as it digs deeper into the mechanisms at work within the enormous corpus of Sharia itself. But, despite my quibble below, this unique undertaking is important for the student of Sharia in the broader sense of the word, whether a lawyer, historian, social scientist, or linguist.

Messick situates himself squarely in the Western scholarly tradition of Sharia, which adopted as its main challenge the relation between theory and practice. The tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship assumed, in the words of Joseph Schacht, "discordance between the sacred law and actual practice" and it focused its attention on the doctrinal legal literature. From the second half of the twentieth century, social historians began paying attention to court records, land titles, administrative registries, and other legal documents; and since the 1990s scholars such as Wael Hallaq and Baber Johansen have combined the two by studying the interaction between these different legal materials.

To begin with, the field was dominated by philologists. Then came anthropologists, who studied the contemporary practices of Sharia. With scholars like Messick, however, a cross-breed of academics entered the field: anthropologists who also made use of texts. Messick calls this "literate anthropology," a result of which is his The Calligraphic State in 1993. With his new book he is expanding this approach into what he calls "a text-focused anthropological history of the past" (p. 39). According to Messick, "a maturing historical...