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Introduction As opposed to other branches of law, the codification of Muslim personal status was a latecomer in the Gulf States, which-with the exception of Kuwait in the 1980s and Oman in the 1990s-only codified family law in the early twenty-first century. One reason for the apparent neglect of reform in this area of the law may be the distinctive economic status of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states. As rentier states, these monarchies have regularly relied on generous governmental benefits to “cushion” some of the negative social and economic side effects of applying pre-modern Islamic legal doctrine in a contemporary setting. In some Gulf States, for example, instead of reforming traditional divorce law, divorced women and their children were for a long time simply granted public housing or governmental allowances…

I. Social Facts According to its latest census of 2010, Bahrain’s population numbers about 1.25 million, only 46% of which are Bahraini citizens. More than half of Bahrain’s population are non-national temporary immigrants, mostly from other Arab countries and South Asia. Muslims constitute 70.2% of the total population and 99.8% of the national population. There are about 1,100 Christian and 40 Jewish Bahraini citizens, although census data does not distinguish between different non-Muslim religio…