Brinkley Messick is professor of anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute. In 2009, he received the Outstanding Senior Scholar Award from the Middle East section of the American Anthropological Association. His Calligraphic State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middle Eastern Studies Association; he coedited Islamic Legal Interpretation: Muftis and Their Fatwas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), and his Sharīʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology was published by Columbia University Press in 2018.