The Making of Civil Codes in the Arab Mashriq, 1925-1976

Research project

Enacted more than half a century ago, the civil codes of the Arab states of the Eastern Mediterranean continue to inspire reverence and admiration much in the same way as monuments do: as modern structures that repackage symbols, notions, and standards of the past with a view to preserving their memory and revalorizing them for contemporary life. Yet as private law codes, they were created not as cultural edifices, by architects or artists, but by jurists and lawyers, setting out abstract, technical and conceptual legal principles. How, then, did these civil codes come to mark political, cultural, and ideological currents? Why did their drafting and enactment elicit controversy and disruption in the interwar and post-war eras? And how were they able to command almost uncritical veneration during the decades that followed? To think about such questions is also to reflect on the jurists who drafted these laws as well as the lawyers, judges, and politicians who framed them. Who were they? What were their aims and ideals in drawing on, manipulating, and reusing symbols of the past in reforming civil law? What were their political, intellectual, and cultural views, their beliefs and expectations? Just as importantly, how did they succeed in drafting and enacting these codes in the face of organized opposition and unrelenting controversy?

This project contemplates these questions by examining the histories of Arab civil codes. It looks at how political ideologies of nation-building as well as notions of cultural superiority were carefully infused into them, and at how the universalistic European systems of comparative law that underpinned them were employed not only for codification and modernization, but also for the concretization of imagined political utopias of unity.