Brinkley M. Messick

Director of Middle East Institute; Professor of Anthropology

Email: bmm23@columbia.edu

Islamic law; Yemen; Arabic texts; Shari’a; Memory, Museums, and the Archive; Morality and Ethics; Legalities; Economy

Brinkley Messick specializes in the anthropology of law, legal history, written culture, and the circulation and interpretation of Islamic legal texts.  He is the author of The Calligraphic State (1993), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, and co-editor of Islamic Legal Interpretation (1996). His recently published book is Shariʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology (2018). Among his scholarly articles are “Indexing the Self: Expression and Intent in Islamic Legal Acts,” Islamic Law & Society (2001); “Written Identities: Legal Subjects in an Islamic State,” History of Religions (1998);  “Genealogies of Reading and the Scholarly Cultures of Islam,” in S. Humphreys, ed. Cultures of Scholarship (1997); and “Textual Properties: Writing and Wealth in a Yemeni Shari a Case,” Anthropology Quarterly (1995).

His two current projects are on shari'a litigation, focusing on doctrine and court records and questions of truth and method, and evidence and interpretation; and on the agrarian shari'a, concerning the relations of landed property, trade, state and family.

He teaches courses on Islamic law; Islam and theory; and Written Culture. In 2009 he received the Outstanding Senior Scholar Award from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association.