From the Classical Court to the Modern Family Court

Qadi courts spread across the Islamic world from the earliest centuries of Islamic rule and remained the primary venue for legal dispute resolution in Muslim majority societies for well over a thousand years, developing distinct regional and school specific variations while sharing the same basic single judge structure throughout. The nineteenth and twentieth century codification movements that swept much of the Muslim world under colonial influence and later independent state building narrowed the qadi's classical jurisdiction sharply, as commercial, criminal and much civil law was recodified along European influenced lines and moved into secular state courts, leaving qadi courts, where they survive today, largely confined to personal status matters such as marriage, divorce and inheritance.

Hallaq's broader study of sharia's theory and practice describes this narrowing as one of the deepest institutional transformations Islamic law underwent in the modern period, since it separated a legal tradition that had once claimed comprehensive jurisdiction from most of the domains it had historically governed, leaving family law as the one area where the classical qadi model most often continues to operate largely intact within a modern state judicial system.