A Study of the Consolidation of Islamic Law and Modern Western Law in the Iranian Penal Code

There is a truism that “there doesn’t exist in the modern world a pure judicial system formed without exterior influence” (Arminjon, Nolde, and Wolff 1950: 49, as cited in Palmer 2007). According to this axiom, no nation’s laws can claim to be purely indigenous. The Iranian law is no exception. The two main codes—the Civil Code (enacted in 1928 with no major changes following the Islamic Revolution of 1979) and the Penal Code (first enacted in 1925 and then replaced by post-revolution codes)—contained mixed provisions borrowed from various systems.