The Role of Personal Statutes in Social Development in Islamic Countries

I take it that this title, which was not of my devising, is intended to cover the contribution that the series of partial or comparatively comprehensive codifications of the law of personal status, which have appeared in recent years in one Muslim country after another, has played or might play in the development of social conditions in general, and of family relations in particular, in the area concerned. But I shall confine my remarks in this paper to those legislative enactments which codify or restate principles of family law which are, or profess to be, specifically Islamic, whether they are applicable to Muslims alone or to those of more than one religion, rather than make any attempt to deal with the family law peculiar to one or another of the non-Muslim communities–partly because any comprehensive consideration of the latter would be too wide and detailed a task for such a paper as this, partly because each of these other systems of law is of comparatively restricted application, and partly because it is the Islamic law which has been the subject of my own specialist study.