Al-Sanhuri’s Theory of Rights in Islamic Jurisprudence: The Final Act of Franco-Egyptian Comparative Law

Abstract

The Theory of Rights in Islamic Jurisprudence, known also as The Sources of Rights (Masadir al-haqq fi-l-fiqh al-islami), originated as a series of lectures delivered by the preeminent Egyptian jurist ʿAbd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri in the second half of the 1950s. These lectures represent a high point in certain reformist methods in Islamic legal thought as cultivated in Egypt between the two world wars, particularly by professors of national Egyptian and Islamic law at the law faculty of Cairo University. In his lectures, al-Sanhuri combined theories and methods of a European style of comparative law with reformist methods advanced by certain Islamic law scholars of his era to develop a practical theory of modern Islamic private law. Through this analysis, al-Sanhuri attempted to demonstrate the consonance of the Egyptian Civil Code of 1948 and other Arab civil codes with the Sharia, even though articles of these codes were borrowed from European law codes.