Writing and authority in The Calligraphic State
Brinkley Messick’s account of highland Yemen follows texts through the practices and institutions that gave them authority.
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Articles
Case comments, document notes, books and research guides.
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What a history of legal formation has to explain
Wael Hallaq’s Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law provides a starting point for separating the history of texts from the development of legal institutions.
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Two provincial courts in Ottoman Anatolia
Boğaç Ergene’s study of Çankırı and Kastamonu offers a comparison of legal practice through two bounded bodies of court records.
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Forty-one documents and several layers of description
Princeton’s Islamic MSS Third Series 584e preserves documents together with later descriptions that do not always identify them in the same way.
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Reading Islamic law in context
A court judgment, a jurist's opinion, a manuscript: each asks a different kind of question. Start with the document, then follow its context.
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Opinion, judgment, statute: identify the source
Document types are a research tool. Ask who speaks, to whom, and with what institutional effect before comparing legal materials.
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A small toolkit for open research
Use catalogues, DOI records and open-access indexes together. Each answers a different question about a source.
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