Our purpose is to examine the significance of the Sunni-Shi'i unity (or divide) in Iraq upon the adoption of a unified Code of Personal Status in 1959. By way of caveat, it must be emphasised at the outset that several constraints are characteristic of any research on Iraq. Sources are scarce and reports of the shun'a courts were not accessible. The development of case law, which Professor Anderson had described in his seminal commentary on the Code in 1960 as central to the analysis of the status of personal law,l has therefore not been possible. But there were other ways which could be probed, and the present article looks into the problems across the Shi'i-Sunni divide which the Code faced in its early days. The discovery of a treatise emanating from the Shi'i circles most opposed to the unification of the law, as well as the lieu which formed the backbone of this opposition, will serve as points of focus for a reassessment of the Iraqi family Code in its "udied personal law system v. community personal laws" dimension.2 Be treatise which forms the basis of the reassessment was published in Najaf in 1963. It was written by a promising young scholar, Muhammad Bahr al-'Ulum.3 Bahr al-'Ulum, who was born in 1927, belongs to a Shi'i family famous for its scholarship in