Brinkley Messick, The Calligraphic State:

Textual Domination and History in a Muslim Society.

Studies on Muslim Societies, 16.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. xii, 341 pp.

 

Reviewed by Daniel Martin Varisco

 

[Yemen Update 36(1995):24-25]

In 1993 MESA awarded the annual AlbertHourani Award to Brinkley Messick for his ground-breaking studyentitled The Calligraphic State. Reading through this book itbecomes readily apparent why this particular book was chosen for suchan honor. Messick has built on his ethnographic fieldwork amongYemeni jurists to provide a commentary on how Islamic law is appliedin context. We are brought into the world of the qadi, themufti and the hakim and the textual universe theynavigate. In highlighting the discourse of fiqh in a Yemenicontext, we are left with a much fuller appreciation of Islamic lawthan a textual reading by itself could provide. Here we see a primeexample of how anthropology, at the cutting edge, can contribute to asubject once the exclusive domain of reclusive Orientalists. Perhapsthe highest compliment that can be given this book is that the oftendry subject of the history of law is presented in a refreshing waythat is sure to wet the appetite of a wide range of scholarsinterested in the history of Islam.

What is this book all about? The author (p.1) states it clear and concise at the start:

"This book examines the changing relation between writing and authority in a Muslim society. Its backdrop is the end of an era of reed pens and personal seals, of handwritten books and professional copyists, of lesson circles in mosques and knowledge recited from memory, of court judgements on lengthy scrolls and scribes toiling behind slant-topped desks. As understood here, the calligraphic state was both a political entity and a discursive condition. My aims are to reconstruct one such textual polity and detail its gradual transformation in recent times."

The polity here is highland Yemen,particularly the traditional town of Ibb where Messick originally didfieldwork in the mid-1970s. Ibb lies along the main road up thecentral axis of Yemen linking Sanaa' and Ta'izz. Messick notes thatafter this road was paved in 1975, the traditional six-day trip tothe capital only took three hours. But this is not just a book aboutIbb, as the author makes clear his intent to broaden the discussionto the application of law in Yemen as a whole and indeed to the"textual concerns of broader civilizational and comparativerelevance" (p. 3).

The organization of the book follows closelythe main components in what might be called the textual context ofIslamic law. We begin with "Authority," specifically what defined theauthoritative structure of the legal genre; one could even say whatlegitimized some texts over others. "Authority in a text," writesMessick (p. 16) "depended on a combination of attributes bothascribed and achieved: there were the built-in features of textualancestry and authorship as well as an acquired reputation and recordof dissemination." Particular attention is paid to the genres ofmatn, a basic text often memorized by a student, andshar'ia, the elucidating commentary. The matn is adifficult text to understand since it is a "kind of stripped-down,subconventional prose" (p. 30), perhaps in this regard not unlike themedieval agricultural almanacs I have been trying to make sense of.Messick shows the connections and intricacies of various textualtraditions in Yemen, including the Shafi'i, Zaydi, Ottoman and moremodern Republican.

The next section of the book is devoted to"Transmission." Messick begins here with the recollections of QadiMuhammad al-Akwa', the well-known Yemeni scholar and historian, whospoke of his own fears as a youth in going to Quranic school (whichhe once thought of as a 'slaughter house'). What follows is a superbdiscussion of what it was like at the starting end of a scholar'sprogress in traditional Yemen. I was especially struck by thecomments of an Ibb scholar who noted his own rebellious youth withthe observation that "when a boy is full of jinn (spirits) asa youth he will have great intelligence as an adult" (p. 76). This isa line I quickly committed to my own meager capacity for memorizationto recite the next time my 10-year old son prefigures his"intelligence." We are shown the impact on schooling of the printingpress, brought to Yemen for the first time in 1877 by the Ottomans(p. 115). Print culture was one of the stimuli to the eventualdownfall of the imamate system and Messick notes that the role ofyoung scholars (such as Muhammad al-Akwa') in this revolutionaryeffort has been overshadowed by the more obvious political acts ofthe military.

We now reach the stage of "Interpretation,"the application of law to the everyday life of Muslims. The focus ison the Mufti of Ibb, with details on how legal judgements, particularthe fatwa, were made and how courts operated. Of particular value isthe discussion of the difference between a mufti and aqadi. Unlike the case for judges, Messick (p. 143) shows thatthe main requirements for a muft£ are simply moral uprightnessand intellectual attainment. "Muftis," Messick (p. 151) continues,"were the creative mediators of the ideal and the real of theshari'a."

The final resting point of Messick'sanalysis is "Inscription." This part begins with a long quotationfrom the Quran (2:282-284), which passage Messick states is theprincipal source for approved use of documents in Islam. A number ofinteresting ideas about Islamic texts as texts are explored in thesefinal two chapters and conclusion. Among these are the implicationsof the transmission from speech to writing (p. 205), the importanceof the witness (pp. 206-208), the relevance of registration ofdocuments (pp. 222-223), and the relation between physical andconceptual space. The short conclusion sums up what Messick calls thecondition of the "calligraphic state." "In this regard," he (p. 255)writes, "the 'calligraphic state' is itself a construct, referringneither to a specific polity and its dissolution nor to a particulardiscursive moment and its transformation. It is instead a compositeof historical materials and must finally give way to the phenomenaout of which it was built."

To assist the reader, the book includes abrief biographical guide to the historical figures mentioned and aglossary. The notes are extensive and should not be neglected. Theauthor chose not to use transliteration, a rather costly act thatmost publishers hate with a passion. It would have been nice,however, if the few pages of the glossary had been transliterated. Ionly noticed a few printing errors (for example, 'possesions' on p.48 and 'parlimentary' on p. 71), but the most glaring is themispelling of Paul Dresch's name as Dresh in the text andbibliography, while properly spelled on the back of the flyleaf. Ialso wonder why some first names in the bibliography are spelled outand others are not, but I am probably one of the few people who wouldeven take note of such obvious trivia.

If The Calligraphic State does notalready grace your private bookshelf or reside expectantly on theshelves of your nearest university library, it should. If yourinterest is in Yemen, I would go so far as to say it must.