Such investigations call for painstaking, meticulous, and detailed microanalyses-a task that Messick executes to perfection.
He investigates the manner in which localized and context-specific texts (what he terms the “archive”) are informed by, but also impact, wide-ranging and unmoored intellectual traditions (the “library”). Messick’s interest lies in the relations among these various types of texts. These range from shari‘a courts’ case records, fiqh works, fatwas, and the imam’s ikhtiyars, to leases and notarial documents in private collections. He asserts and models the significance of studying the shari‘a as a localized practice through a focus on writing in all its genres. Location is vital to Messick’s analysis and argument. This temporal and geographical focus affords Messick the opportunity to examine one of the very few modern settings of the shari‘athat avoided direct colonial rule. Brinkley Messick’s scintillating new book charts the historical anthropology of Yemeni legal texts and textual practice at a particularly charged time in the region’s history: the pre-Republican period of the 20th century when the Zaydi Imamate was on the cusp of modernity and before the ravages of the nation-state obliterated that era’s ethico-legal operations.
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