SHARIAsource

For more context on this document, see Dominik Krell's Islamic Law Blog Roundtable essay, "Modern Forensic Technology and the Evolution of Islamic Criminal Law in Saudi Arabia."

By Dominik Krell

Islamic evidence law had long remained uncodified in Saudi Arabia. Although Saudi rulers issued laws (anẓima, sg. niẓām) to regulate the judiciary from the early twentieth century onwards, these laws did not contain a systematic law of evidence. Later legislation regulated certain procedural matters, such as the summoning of witnesses and related administrative rules but did not address Islamic evidence law itself.

In practice, judges instead turned to books by Islamic jurists (fuqahāʾ). Published court decisions from the 2010s suggest that judges drew on authorities from all four Sunnī schools (madhhabs), although Ḥanbalī works remained particularly important. These included, among others, Ibn al-Qayyim’s (d. 751/1350) well-known treatment of judicial procedure, al-Ṭuruq al-ḥukmiyya fi'l-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya.

In 2022, the Law of Evidence (Niẓām al-Ithbāt) was issued as the first of four promised codifications of Islamic law. It received much less attention, however, than the Personal Status Law (Niẓām al-Aḥwāl al-Shakhṣiyya), issued later in 2022, or the Civil Transactions Law (Niẓām al-Muʿamalāt al-Madaniyya), issued in 2023. The fourth-announced codification, a Criminal Code, has not yet been issued as of April 2026.

The Law of Evidence was issued by Royal Decree No. M/43 on 31 December 2021 and came into force on 7 July 2022. Later in 2022, the Ministry of Justice issued detailed procedural instructions, and in 2024, the Ministry’s Research Centre published an official commentary on the law.

While the Law of Evidence is an important step in the formalisation of Islamic evidence law, its scope is limited. According to Art 1, the Law of Evidence generally applies only in questions of civil and commercial law and excludes criminal law cases. In criminal law, arguably the most important field of law when it comes to evidence, judges still largely rely on uncodified Islamic law, although a recent amendment to the Law of Criminal Procedure allows for the limited application of the Law of Evidence in criminal cases.

The Law of Evidence is the first major modern codification of Islamic evidence law. It is remarkably comprehensive, consisting of 129 articles. Alongside more general principles of evidence, such as the burden of proof (Art. 2), the Law of Evidence also regulates the various forms of evidence in remarkable detail, such as admission (Arts. 14–9), documents (Arts. 25–52), digital evidence (Arts. 53–64), witness testimony (Arts. 65–83), circumstantial evidence (Arts. 84–85), custom (Arts. 88–91), oaths (Arts. 92–107), inspections (Arts. 108–09), and professional expertise (Arts. 110–24).

The Law of Evidence is clearly rooted in the Islamic legal tradition and appears to draw on views from various schools of law. Yet more research is needed to determine the precise extent to which it combines doctrines from different schools, and the extent to which it departs from core principles of premodern Islamic evidence law.