The Calligraphic State: Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society (Comparative Studies on Muslim Societies, 16, Band 16) - Softcover

Messick, Brinkley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520205154 ISBN 13: 9780520205154

Verlag: University of California Press, 1996

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Brinkley Messick is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.

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"Throws completely fresh light on non-colonial yet modern systems of legality and moral power. . . . The picture given of Islamic legal education and practice is one of the best available . . . a compelling read and a fine book for teaching."—Paul Dresch, Oxford University

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"Throws completely fresh light on non-colonial yet modern systems of legality and moral power. . . . The picture given of Islamic legal education and practice is one of the best available . . . a compelling read and a fine book for teaching." Paul Dresch, Oxford University

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The Calligraphic State

By Brinkley Messick

University of California Press

Copyright © 1996 Brinkley Messick
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520205154
Chapter 1
Genealogies of the Text

The theoretical descent of Roman jurisprudence from a Code, the theoretical ascription of English law to an immemorial unwritten tradition, were the chief reasons why the development of their system differed from the development of ours. Neither theory corresponded exactly with the facts, but each produced consequences of the utmost importance.
Sir Henry Maine

Viewed in detail, the development of the shari'a across the Muslim lands was a phenomenon involving specific men and specific texts. We know something about the particulars of this history because of the existence of accounts arranged in the form of biographical entries. Created by early Muslim historians, these biographical works played a crucial role in tracking the transmission of Islamic knowledge across regions and through successive generations. One such work, composed in twelfth-century Yemen, covers the early generations of Yemeni shari'a scholars. It also traces the arrival in the highlands of authoritative shari'a texts of the era, describing the specific teacher-to-student connections by which they were introduced and then diffused. A local node in one reported line of transmission was a man by the name of Faqih al-Nahi, until his death in 1171 a resident of the town of Ibb.1 The text in question was a famous one, authored by an eminent shari'a jurist of the preceding century named al-Shirazi who lived and taught in Baghdad, an international center of Islamic learning.2

"Between me and the author are two men," al-Nahi of Ibb used to say to his colleagues. In this shorthand manner al-Nahi expressed the particular legitimacy of his stature as a scholar and teacher. It was a remark worthy of citation in an intellectual world in which the texts of knowledge were literally embodied, their conveyance reckoned in terms of known relayers. Authority of this sort relied upon the specification of human links between intellectual generations. Al-Nahi could explain that he had learned the text from his teacher, who had received it from an individual who had acquired it directly from al-Shirazi, in the author's Baghdad lesson circle. Then, as now, Yemeni scholars were

travelers, circulating in search of teachers and knowledge not only throughout their native highlands but also northward to Mecca and beyond to Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. Completing his studies with al-Shirazi, the traveling scholar in question returned to reside in Yemen, where he taught the text to his own students, including a man who would later teach it to a third generation, which included al-Nahi of Ibb. Each of the two intervening scholars identified in al-Nahi's personal line of reception is the subject of a separate entry in the same biographical history.

Authoritative texts are as fundamental to the history of shari'a scholarship as they are to the history of the other intellectual disciplines. Such a text was "relied upon" in a place and time:3 the knowledgeable consulted it, specialists based findings upon it, scholars elaborated its points in commentaries, teachers clarified its subtleties, students committed its passages to heart. Authority in a text depended on a combination of attributes both ascribed and achieved: there were the built-in features of textual ancestry and authorship as well as an acquired reputation and record of dissemination. The fates of such texts were diverse, ranging from an enduring general prominence or more limited respect among the cognoscenti to a purely ephemeral authority and the all-but-forgotten status of the superseded. Since this authority would change radically in the course of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century, its modalities must be examined in some detail.

A primary sort of textual authority was derived:4 it followed from the existence and importance of an original, genuine, and ultimately reliable text, which refers back to the position and identity of the Quran. "In the genealogy of texts," Edward Said writes (1983:46), "there is a first text, a sacred prototype, a scripture, which readers always approach through the text before them." A genealogy of authoritative texts in Islam must begin with a consideration of the Quran as the authoritative original. The paradigmatic, Urtext qualities of the Quran concern both content and textual form. Substantively, the Quran and the Sunna, the practice of the Prophet, constituted the two fundamental "sources" (usul , sing. asl ) for the elaboration of shari'a jurisprudence. Discursively, the Quran represents both the end and the beginning of the kitab (text, scripture, writing, book). Just as Muhammad was the last, the "seal," of the Prophets, and also the first Muslim, the Quran was the definitive and final kitab , whose particular authority would initiate and delimit a discursive tradition.

A central problem in Muslim thought concerns the difficult transi-

tion from the unity and authenticity of the Text of God to the multiplicity and inherently disputed quality of the texts of men. A concurrent underlying tension was generated in shari'a scholarship where an unresolvable gulf opened between divinely constituted truth and humanly constituted versions of that truth. Purists of all eras, including many contemporary "fundamentalists," have made a distinction between the divine shari'a, defined as God's comprehensive and perfect design for His community, and a humanly produced shari'a, or, more precisely, the corpus of knowledge known as fiqh (usually translated "jurisprudence"), a necessarily flawed attempt to understand and implement that design. In this gap between divine plan and human understanding lay the perennially fertile space of critique, the locus of an entire politics articulated in the idiom of the shari'a.

If the transition from the divine plan to its human versions was difficult, it was also necessary, for the truth of Revelation could only be implemented through the medium of human understanding. With the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the Muslim community found itself cut off both from further Quranic Revelations and from the Prophet's own practice, that is, from further elaborations of the two "sources" of secure knowledge. Thereafter, the community confronted the problems of developing a more detailed corpus of rules and procedures while continually adjusting to new social realities.

The growth of the fiqh as a body of knowledge, resulting from the work of jurists in the early centuries of Islam, brought with it the inevitable disagreements associated with purely human creativity. Authoritative fiqh works endeavored to further define the already definitive. Their derivitiveness was both necessary to their nature and the crux of their problematic: they were texts in the world of the Text. Participating with self-assurance in an authentic tradition, such texts had their recognized antecedent sources and their means of establishing legitimacy. At the same time, they pertained to history rather than to the eternal; to societies of rifts and hierarchies rather than to the ideal communitas of the umma ; to difference rather than to certainty.

Condensed and practical fiqh manuals, known as the mutun (sing. matn , lit. "text"), were a distinct category of authoritative text. At first glance, such manuals seem to have little to recommend their consideration. Since they...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1996
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520205154
• ISBN 13: 9780520205154
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 356
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: De Gruyter Saur; orders-books@degruyter.com; ; Genthiner Str. 13; Berlin; 10785; Deutschland