Egyptian legal reformers invoked Europe’s civilization to justify law reform.

Evidence

Thus the lawyer Hamid Zaki, in arguing for the reform of personal status law, refers repeatedly to European societies as “civilized countries,” implying perhaps that Egypt was not quite one of them yet (“al-Maha¯kim al-ahliyya wa alahwa¯l al-shakhsiyya,” Majallat al-qa¯nu¯n wa al-iqtisa¯d, December ). — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 1017