Mecelle

The Mecelle, formally the Mecelle-i Ahkam-i Adliye, was the civil code of the Ottoman Empire, drafted from 1869 to 1876 by a commission headed by the scholar-statesman Ahmed Cevdet Pasha and taking force in 1877. It was the first codification of Hanafi Islamic jurisprudence into a modern, European-style civil code applicable regardless of the litigants' religion, covering sale, hire, guarantee, pledges, trusts, gifts, agency, evidence and court procedure across sixteen books and 1,851 articles. After the Ottoman Empire's dissolution, the Mecelle persisted for decades as positive law in successor states, remaining in force in Turkey until 1926, Albania until 1928, Lebanon until 1932, Syria until 1949, Iraq until 1953, Cyprus into the 1960s, and Mandatory Palestine and later Israel formally until 1984.