Page 185 - UAE Truncal States

Chapter Four

committed either by immigrants who had come during the pearling
boom or by desperate, impoverished beduin raiders. Neither group
was really part of the communities in the coastal towns which wore
mostly affected by this development. The call for jurisdiction by the
sharl'ah judges rather than the Ruler in such cases signified that
sharVah became universally accepted because it could overrule the
temporal Ruler’s whims and was binding on all Muslims no matter
where they were born.
The dualism, and in some instances even polarisation, of cus­
tomary jurisdiction and sharl'ah became more acute from the 1930s
on. People were aware that not all cases and not everyone should be
subject to the traditional jurisdiction. The development during the
1940s of a set of regulations for the trial of foreigners on the one hand
and the necessity to introduce laws to deal with novel offences such
as traffic accidents, labour and contractual disputes on the other
hand, led to the limitation of the jurisdiction of the sharl'ah in the
Trucial States, in the same way as it is limited in most Muslim
countries. Already during the late 1940s the sharl'ah courts in Dubai
operated a register of marriages which took place in the town, and
became the authority which handled all matters relating to personal
status, family affairs and inheritance, while criminal offences
reverted to the political authorities, both local and British. Regu­
lations were devised for new situations by way of Rulers’ decrees
and His Majesty’s Order in Council.05
The fact that sharl'ah, in the narrower sense of the law such as is
administered by specialised graduates from foreign law schools, has
not been the exclusive legal and judicial authority anywhere in the
Trucial States, does not preclude the important role of the spirit of
sharl'ah as the common guide for relationships between the people.
It is therefore not surprising that the current efforts of federal and
regional authorities in the UAE to create a new code of laws, which
suits the vastly transformed society of the present day, do not only
try to adapt other Arab or European laws, but also follow the
growing trend throughout Muslim Stales to base laws on the
sharl'ah by re-interpreting fiqh. The very undoctrinal religiousness
of the local society, rather than legalistic deliberations concerning
the reconciliation of different sources of law, help to pave the way for
the ascendancy of sharl'ah in legislation and jurisdiction in the UAE
at the present time.66

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