New Course Proposed by CSMS Faculty Members Funded by Columbia Global Scholars Program

Course title: Critical Texts and Practices in the Study of Muslim Societies: Orientalism and Its Others to be offered in 2019 with instruction at Columbia and in Tunis, Fez and Rabat.

GSP supports curricular development and innovation for undergraduate students. GSP was successfully launched, with generous support from the President’s Office, in 2012 as a pilot program by the Weatherhead East Asian Institute. Beginning in the summer of 2012, groups of undergraduate students, competitively chosen from across all Columbia schools and disciplines, have been led by Columbia faculty on multi-week, multi-country research workshops on themes of global importance. Unlike traditional study abroad programs, GSP allows students to conduct fieldwork in one area of the world and then test their findings in additional host countries that offer new sets of variables. GSP builds on the expertise, resources, and cross-regional networks offered by Columbia’s eight Global Centers. Its aim is to help undergraduates map the globe by exploring transnational issues and applying social science research skills in a range of challenging and diverse international contexts. In 2017, it transitioned to a joint initiative between the Office of Global Programs and Columbia Global Centers.

Marwa Elshakry, Lead Faculty Director of Critical Texts and Practices in the Study of Muslim Societies: Orientalism and Its Others (Tunis, Fez, and Rabat) is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University, where she specializes in the history of science, technology, and medicine in the modern Middle East.

"Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology" by Brinkley Messick

A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Sharīʿa Scripts (Columbia University Press), 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.

Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies as well as the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University. He is the author of The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (1993) and a coeditor of Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (1996).