As is well known, the law of Turkey underwent a revolution in the year I926 with the adoption of codes of European origin-virtually lock, stock and barrel-in place of the laws of very heterogeneous background which had previously obtained. This momentous decision involved the most decisive break with the past in the law of personal status and family relations, where the Islamic law of the Hanafi school was replaced, almost overnight, by the Swiss Civil Code. It is true that the Hanafi law had been temporarily modified, in I9I7, by the Ottoman Law of Family Rights: but this codification had been firmly based on the Shari'a, although it did substitute either a variant Hanafi opinion or the doctrine of some other Sunni school, in a number of particulars, for the dominant Hanafi doctrine which had previously prevailed; and this Law was, in any case, repealed in Turkey in 1919-although it survived in some of those States which were carved out of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. It was not without considerable hesitation that even Mustafa Kemal Pasha and his