Samir Saad is a legal and intellectual historian of the Middle East. He is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law. After studying for a BA in politics in Canada and for an LLB in the UK, he completed an MPhil and a PhD in Middle Eastern history at Cambridge University.

Project Description:

Private Acts and Public Visions: jurists, civil codes, and the politics of progress in the nation-building projects of the Late Ottoman Empire and the twentieth century Arab Mashriq, 1876-1976

Undertaken and masterminded by a group of elite jurists and politicians, the replacement of the decades-old Ottoman civil code, the Mecelle-i Ahkâm-ı Adliye, with more modern civil codes was a closely-guarded and drawn-out affair in the twentieth century Arab Mashriq. Turkish jurists and politicians succeeded in ridding Turkey of the Ottoman legislation in a staggering few months in 1926. By contrast, Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, and Jordanian jurists and politicians struggled to implement legislative plans for a new civil code under the pressure of local and regional rivalries, political crises, and ideological differences. The Mecelle lingered on in Lebanon until 1932, in Syria until 1949, in Iraq until 1951, and in Jordan until 1976. In each case, the politicians which oversaw the making of these civil codes ensured to mark their legislation with a prediction on the power of their respective code to shape the direction of legal reform and progress in the rest of the Arab Mashriq. How should we understand these protracted reform projects and the vatic declamations which framed them? And what do these fraught and controversial legislative processes tell us about the visions of interwar Arab jurists and their place in the political worlds and the nation-building projects of the twentieth century Arab Mashriq? To answer these questions, and to tell the story of how the Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi, and Jordanian civil code projects were initiated, disrupted, altered, replaced, and ultimately enacted, I draw on a number of Arabic, Ottoman, French, and English sources, ranging from government documents to personal correspondence; from autobiographies to jurisprudential writings; and from interviews to legal drafts and urtexts.