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A case study in the textual architecture of the venerable legal and ethical tradition at the center of the Islamic experience, Sharīʿa Scripts 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

In the first half of Sharīʻa Scripts, Messick looks at the principal types of theoretical or doctrinal juridical texts, which are collectively referred to as the "library," while those of the second half, including the genres produced by the sharīʻa courts and by notarial writers, are termed the "archive." Messick demonstrates the analytic significance of sustained attention to the textual form of written sources such as the doctrinal works, juridical opinions, court records and legal instruments studied here. He suggests that attention to form should be a precondition for wider research, for properly assessing the import of conventional source content, for the writing of history. Messick looks at historical sharīʻa through a particular instance, that of highland Yemen in the first half of the twentieth century. Yemen, of course, is an integral region of the Arabic-speaking heartlands of Islam, and the Zaydī school of jurisprudence that is the specific focus of the book has been rooted there for a millennium. Elsewhere in the same period, colonial regimes and nationalist reformers had begun to alter the political, societal and epistemic existence of the sharīʻa. They acted to replace its criminal, commercial and real estate provisions with western law, and effectively narrowed its sphere of relevance to matters of personal status and family law. In contrast, under the twentieth-century Zaydī imams the sharīʻa remained uncodified; highland sharīʻa courts maintained their historically broad competence; madrassa-trained judges employed classical sharīʻa rules of procedure and evidence; and archives had yet to upended by western-style standards of file-keeping and printed forms

'Hawaiki, Ancestral Polynesia: An Essay in Historical Anthropology' by Patrick Vinton Kirch and Roger C. Green is reviewed.

Muslim Societies in Africa provides a concise overview of Muslim societies in Africa in light of their role in African history and the history of the Islamic world. Roman Loimeier identifies patterns and peculiarities in the historical, social, economic, and political development of Africa, and addresses the impact of Islam over the longue durée. To understand the movements of peoples and how they came into contact, Loimeier considers geography, ecology, and climate as well as religious conversion, trade, and slavery. This comprehensive history offers a balanced view of the complexities of