Egyptian Civil Code - Historical Background

Historical Background

Egypt began legal reform since 1875 when it gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in judicial and legal matters, which led to the establishment of the Mixed Courts to deal with foreigners and national courts. This necessitated a need for a set of laws that had secular influence. When Egypt obtained the needed international agreement for the union of its legal system in 1937, it started to draw up a new series of comprehensive codes. Most of this effort was overseen by the Egyptian jurist Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri. The code was originally drafted in 1942, but went through several revisions before its passage in 1949.

Its author, Al-Sanhuri, stayed loyal to his vision of having judges rule in accordance with the code itself before considering using Shari’a, which had not been codified for a long time. For the first time in the modern history of the Arab Middle East, the Shari’a would be used to back up a secular document. With the civil code as the principal source of law, all Shari’a courts were abolished. The writing of the Civil code was an attempt on the part of Al-Sanhuri to modernize Islamic law by adopting ideas from western civil law, a concept greatly supported by the elite members of Egyptian society. Westernization meant confining certain Islamic law to mostly matters dealing with personal status such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance.

British colonization led to some shift from the common law, but the common law had little long-term impact on the legal systems of many countries that fell under British rule. Thus civil law, mostly of French origins, now prevails throughout the Middle East, and the occasional remnants of common law are likely not to survive. As a result, the modern legal systems of Middle Eastern countries share the basic features of French law, such as relying on complete and logical statements of the law in codes as official sources of law, keeping a sharp division between public and private law and between commercial and private law.