Personal status law: residual sources and jurisdiction

The requirement of adherence to the Hanafi school of jurisprudence was intro­duced by an Ottoman decree issued in the nineteenth century and, contrary to previous Egyptian practice, was taken up in subsequent regulations such as that of 26 December 1856, and the decree regulating shari'a courts in 1897.

The term ‘personal status’ in the Islamic shari'a was not known to the Muslim jurists. The rulings of the shari'a are divided into two parts: one relates to articles of faith such as monotheism, and belief in God and his angels, his Book and his prophets, the other to the acts of humans, which in turn is divided into acts of worship or ritual ('ibadat∖ and transactions (mu'amalat). 'Ibadat are acts that bring a person closer to God, such as praying and fasting, while mu'amalat regulate relationships between people, including contracts and dispositions, whether these concern family relationships, such as engagement and marriage, or property and acts of sale and hire.

In 1934, the Egyptian Court of Cassation established a definition for the term ‘personal status’:

All that which differentiates one person from another in terms of natural or family characteristics and which have a legal effect in his social life through being a male or a female, husband or widower or divorcee, a father or a son, of full legal capacity or not due to minor age, imbecility or insanity, or being of absolute capacity or limited capacity due to legal reasons.¹⁴

In a 1949 Egyptian law, the following were listed as personal status issues:

disputes and questions related to the status of persons and their legal capacity, or related to the regulation of the family, such as engagement, marriage, the mutual rights and responsibilities of the spouses, dower and dowry, financial arrangements between the spouses, talaq, judicial divorce and judicial dis­solution, paternity and denial of paternity, the relations between ascendants and descendants, maintenance of relatives, in-laws, correction of filiation, adoption, guardianship, tutorship and trusteeship, interdiction and permission to administer; absence and considering a missing person dead, and similarly disputes and questions related to inheritance, bequests and other dispositions after death.¹⁵

Some ol these issues, such as interdiction and permission to administer, have been regulated by unified civil legislation applicable to all Egyptians regardless of religion; however, marriage and divorce, and matters related to them, remain regulated by religious laws — the Islamic shari'a for Muslims and Christian and Jewish rules for the respective communities.