© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156851910X537775 Islamic Law and Society 18 (2011) 219-249 www.brill.nl/ils Islamic Law and Society Correspondence: Dr. Ron Shaham, Dept. of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, e Hebrew University, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel. E-mail: shaham@huji.ac.il. Law versus Medical Science: Competition between Legal and Biological Paternity in an Egyptian Civil Court Ron Shaham Abstract e 1942 lawsuit that is translated, annotated and analyzed in this article raises questions about the judicial acceptability of new types of evidence developed by modern science. A husband who suspected that his wife was carrying the child of her lover asked the ahlī court of summary justice in Alexandria to determine the identity of the child’s biological father by means of a blood-group test. e judge’s refusal to comply with the request, on the grounds that he lacked jurisdiction, reflects a decision by Egyptian legislators and judges to leave the establishment of paternity to evidentiary rules that are shaped by cultural values about marriage, legitimacy and morality. ese values do not always favor decision-making based on the full range of scientifically available facts. Keywords paternity (biological, legal), paternity tests, adultery, shariʿa and civil courts, expert witnesses, Islamic law vs. modern science Introduction: Standard and Expert Witnessing Islamic law, or fiqh, maintains a clear preference for oral testimony predicated on eye-witnessing (shahāda) over any other mode of evi- dence. Schacht, the leading twentieth-century scholar in the field, claimed that fiqh prohibits judges from relying on circumstantial