‘From the Majallat al-Aḥkām al-ʿAdliyya to a civil code’: the politics of reforming civil law in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq, 1925-1951

Abstract

This dissertation explores a profound transformation: the replacement by Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq of the Majallat al-Aḥkām al-ʿAdliyya, known to some as the Ottoman civil code, with a positive and more secular civil code during the interwar years of the twentieth century. In showing that local and regional politics formed a powerful motor of legal development and reform, this dissertation challenges the long-held view that the replacement of the Majalla and the making of the Lebanese, Syrian, and Iraqi civil codes amounted to nothing more than a transplantation project of other European and foreign civil codes, undertaken by colonial and foreign jurists, and that, as a result, these codes can only be historically analysed by measuring the extent to which they deviated from the bodies of law which they ostensibly replaced, Islamic law and jurisprudence. Moving away from the textual to the contextual, the dissertation centres its analysis on local politicians and jurists in these three countries to reveal the important, yet understudied links between political history and the creation of these three civil codes. In revealing these links, the dissertation shows that these complex political histories are essential to understanding the processes and motives which resulted in the legislation of all three codes.