ABSTRACT
Family law, as far as the Arab populations of Islam were concerned, was generally administered in accordance with strict Sharia doctrine. Among some communities the force of indigenous custom was strong enough to deny the Sharia any influence at all in the regulation of their family relationships. However sincere their profession and practice of the faith may have been, they accepted Islam as a religion but not as a way of life, and consequently remained, from the standpoint of strict orthodoxy, only superficially Islamicised. For other Muslim communities custom gave way to the dictates of the Sharia in some legal spheres, but continued to apply in others. Muslim jurisprudence, however, by no means unanimously accepted the validity of hiyal. The Hanafi school, largely because of the formalism which was one of its distinctive characteristics, was able to endorse them, and all the major treatises written in support of hiyal are the work of Hanafi lawyers.
