Brinkley Messick
Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Professor of Anthropology
Director, Middle East Institute
Faculty profile
Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. He was a founding Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies (2010-15), and currently is the Director of the Middle East Institute. He was the Chair of the Department of Anthropology (2004-11), and in 2009, he received the Outstanding Senior Scholar Award from the Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association. His first book, The Calligraphic State (California, 1993), was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middle Eastern Studies Association. He also is a co-editor of Islamic Legal Interpretation (Harvard, 1996), and his recent book, Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology, was published by Columbia University Press in 2018. His current book project concerns the figure of the witness in sharīʿa litigation, in a study that utilizes both juridical doctrine and court case transcripts to address issues of truth and method, and questions of evidence and interpretation.
Publications
Shari'a Scripts: A Historical Anthropology (2018)
Islamic Legal Interpretation, co-editor (1996)
The Calligraphic State (1993)
Awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middle Eastern Studies Association
Scholarly articles include:
“Islamic Texts: The Anthropologist as Reader,” in L. Buskens and A. van Sandwijk, eds., Islamic Studies in the Twenty-first Century (2016)
“Interpreting Tears: A Marriage Case from Imamic Yemen,” in Asifa Qureishi and Frank E. Vogel, eds., The Islamic Marriage Contract (2008)
“Evidence: From Memory to Archive,” Islamic Law & Society (2002)
"Indexing the Self: Expression and Intent in Islamic Legal Acts,"
Islamic Law & Society (2001)
“Written Identities: Legal Subjects in an Islamic State,”
History of Religions (1998)
“Genealogies of Reading and the Scholarly Cultures of Islam,”
in S. Humphreys, ed., Cultures of Scholarship (1997)
“Textual Properties: Writing and Wealth in a Yemeni Shari a Case,” Anthropology Quarterly (1995)
