Modern legal codification abstracted shari’a from lived daily practice

Evidence

Brinkley Messick’s description of how the shart= functioned prior to the modem period reveals certain similarities with contemporary citational prac.. tices involving b. ( Messick 1993 ) . Messick argues that prior to the intro.. duction of the modem legal system in Yemen, the shari�a, while based on a set of founding texts, was not so much a system of codifi rules as it was a set of discursive practices “lived in social relations, in human embodiers and inter.. pretive articulations” (1 993 , 152). These discursive practices entailed not only secondary commentaries on the founding texts, but also the practical ways in which a variety of social actors used the shar·ta to resolve a range of problems and settle arguments. Although the sharica was abstracted from the fabric of daily life in Muslim societies as it increasingly came to be reconcep.. tualized on the model of modem legal systems, the kind of b. practices I have described here, insomuch as they continue to inform a range of everyday practices and arguments, bear a certain similarity to the premodern sharica practice described by Messick. Invocations of the b.adith constitute a genre of speech act that is constantly lived, reworked, and transformed in the context of daily interactions. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 684

Categorization

• XREF: Corroborates the Spivak/Ahmad cluster’s point that Western-modeled legal-institutional codification transforms rather than neutrally imports religious-legal traditions.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does Mahmood imply that reformist liberal feminism’s legalistic frame participates in this same abstraction-from-lived-practice move?