Egyptian Civil Code

The Egyptian Civil Code is the primary source of civil law for Egypt.

The first version of Egyptian Civil Code was written in 1949 containing 1149 articles. The prime author of the 1949 code was the jurist Abd El-Razzak El-Sanhuri, who received assistance from Dean Edouard Lambert of the University of Lille. Perhaps due to Lambert's influence, the 1949 code followed the French civil law model. The code focuses on the regulation of business and commerce, and does not include any provisions regarding family law, which is handled by the law of the individual's religion (e.g. family matters among Muslims follow the Shari’a). El-Sanhuri purposely left out family law and succession to set it apart from the Turkish civil code.

The code also provides for Islamic law(shari’a) to have a role in its enforcement and interpretation. Article 1 of the code provides that, “in the absence of any applicable legislation, the judge shall decide according to the custom and failing the custom, according to the principles of Islamic Law. In the absence of these principles, the judge shall have recourse to natural law and the rules of equity.” Despite this invocation of Islamic law, one commentator has argued that 1949 code reflected a "hodgepodge of socialist doctrine and sociological jurisprudence."

The Egyptian Civil Code has been the source of law and inspiration for numerous other Middle Eastern jurisdictions, including pre-dictatorship kingdoms of Libya and Iraq (both drafted by El-Sanhuri himself and a team of native jurists under his guidance), in addition to Jordan (completed in 1976, after his death) Bahrain (2001), as well as Qatar (1971) (these last two merely inspired by his notions), and the commercial code of Kuwait (drafted by El-Sanhuri). When Sudan drafted its own civil code in 1970, it was in large part copied from the Egyptian Civil Code with slight modifications. Today all Arab nations possessing modern civil codes, with the exception of Saudi Arabia and Oman, are based fully or partly on the Egyptian Civil Code.