The prime author of the 1949 code was the jurist Abd El-Razzak El-Sanhuri, who received assistance from Dean Edouard Lambert of the University of Lille.
"[1] The Egyptian Civil Code has been the source of law and inspiration for numerous other Middle Eastern jurisdictions, including pre-dictatorship kingdoms of Libya and Iraq (both drafted by El-Sanhuri himself and a team of native jurists under his guidance), in addition to Jordan (completed in 1976, after his death) Bahrain (2001), as well as Qatar (1971) (these last two merely inspired by his notions), and the commercial code of Kuwait (drafted by El-Sanhuri).
When Egypt obtained the needed international agreement for the union of its legal system in 1937, it started to draw up a new series of comprehensive codes.
Its author, Al-Sanhuri, stayed loyal to his vision of having judges rule in accordance with the code itself before considering using Shari’a, which had not been codified for a long time.
Westernization meant confining certain Islamic law to mostly matters dealing with personal status such as marriage, divorce, and inheritance.