Regulating the Muslim family in Egypt: the development of personal status law

The first law including procedural rules for litigation in personal status disputes was issued on 27 May 1897 and applied only to Muslim Egyptians. Amendments were introduced by Decree no.

As for substance, a year after Egypt became a British protectorate in 1914, a committee chaired by the Minister of Justice was formed to propose ways in which Islamic law might be reformed; after the war, Law no. 25/1920 was promul­gated introducing certain new rulings in personal status matters. In 1926 another committee was formed to propose further reforms, and subsequently Law Decree no. 25/1929 was issued with further amendments to personal status law. At the same time, as noted above, where the state-issued legislation did not cover the matter in hand, the court was to rule according to the dominant opinion of the Hanafi school; this was explicitly stated in the 1931 law on shari’a courts (al- Bishri 1996: 67). The following paragraphs provide an overview of the contents of the relevant laws affecting personal status for Muslims in Egypt from 1920 until 1985, leaving consideration of the new law of 2000 to Chapter 4 below.¹⁶

Law no. 25 of 1920: concerning maintenance and certain matters of personal status This law codified rules governing the wife’s maintenance, judicial separation at the wife’s petition for the husband’s non-payment of or inability to pay maintenance, and for the husband being afflicted by certain serious physical or psychological conditions (the examples given being ‘insanity or the two kinds of leprosy’).

With regard to the wife’s maintenance, the law states that the wife’s main­tenance is the responsibility of her husband even if she is wealthy or of a different religion, nor is her entitlement affected if she is sick.

Law no. 25 of 1929: concerning certain matters of personal status This law included provisions on unilateral divorce (Ialaq), judicial divorce for injury, the maintenance of the wife and children, child custody and other matters. Article 6 sets out the basic principle of divorce for injury, based on Maliki and Hanbali principles:

If the wife claims that the husband has caused her harm of a kind which would make living together impossible for a couple such as them she may ask the judge for judicial divorce (Iafriq) and the judge shall then grant her an irrevocable divorce if the harm is proved and he is unable to bring about reconciliation between them.

These two early laws might be viewed as to some extent progressive, and represent the first attempt by the Egyptian legislators to have reference to the rulings of non-Hanafi schools and jurists. The Explanatory Memorandum to Law no. 25 of 1929 stated in this regard:

The Ministry decided to restrict the scope of talaq in accordance with the sources and rules of religion and in accordance with the imams and the jurists, even if these [be taken from] other than the adherents of the four schools... There is nothing that forbids this, particularly if adopting their views leads to improved knowledge or the removal of injury, in accordance with the true views of the scholars of jurisprudence...

The Memorandum added that:

It is shari'a policy (siyasa shar'iyyd) that the door of mercy be opened for the people from the shari'a [meaning^/z] itself, and to have recourse to the views of scholars in order to find a remedy for social ills when these ills become insidious, so that people feel that the shari'a ∖fiqh∖ is a way out of want and a relief from hardship.