A Theory of a State? How Civil Law Ended Legal Pluralism in Modern Egypt

'Abd al-Razzaq al-Sanhuri (d. 1971), the father of the Egyptian legal code, theorized a relationship between din (religion) and dawla (state) that was key to his project. In this relationship, al-Sanhuri posited a delineation between the spheres of din and dawla that allowed him to map these categories onto the existing distinction between matters of 'ibadat (acts of worship) and mu'amalat (transactions) in Islamic law (fiqh). I propose that Islamic jurisprudential distinctions between 'ibadat and mu'amalat-for al-Sanhuri - was the ideal medium to maintain and police the borderlines between religion and state in the postcolonial Egyptian state. Al-Sanhuri's objective was to keep the domain of din outside of state sanction and to facilitate a transition whereby the state's legal institutions assumed exclusive lawmaking powers based on its own independent legal reasoning in Islamic law (ijtihad). I argue that al-Sanhuri was a committed comparatist, not a reformer of Islamic law. Al-Sanhari's legal project should be viewed as a faithful commitment to French comparative law as a method of legal inquiry and a reflection of his nationalist agenda of creating a unified legal order that cannot exist without relying upon indigenous forms of law and culture. Al-Sanhuri saw Khedival legal pluralism as an obstacle for national sovereignty. As a result of the institutional and legal readjustments from the 1920s through 1950s in Egypt, al-Sanhuri did not see a future for Islamic law in the emerging legal state apparatus outside of civil law strictures and insisted that Islamic courts and religious tribunals for Jews and Christians must be subsumed under nationalized secular state courts.