Machine summary:
More importantly still, Sharī‘a Scripts features all the qualities required for a true academic milestone in Yemen-related scholarship for decades to come, with potential ramifica tions for the historical and legal anthropology of the Middle East at large.
Messick meticu lously examines the structures of jurisprudence (the “library” in his terms) with the methodologies and techniques of textual scholarship, while relat ing it to the “archive” of records concerning everyday interactions in legal life as embedded within the practical interplay of fields between orality and scriptural statements.
Some of the author’s main interlocutors were distinguished local representatives of these legal traditions, within the networks of regional scholarship in the provinces to the south of the capital.
What emerges from these textual and ethnographic analyses is an an thropology of Islamic juridical traditions, rooted in detailed regional his torical analyses yet simultaneously representing paradigmatic relevance for a topically-focused historical anthropology at large.