Civil law is the fundamental law of a legal system. Any major change to civil law will alter beyond recognition a legal system. Islamic civil law as codified by the Ottomans, al-Majalla, was applied in the modern state of Syria from 1919-1949. Al-Majalla was taught at the Syrian University founded in 1919. Thus, all legal professionals practiced Islamic civil law and all civil courts applied this law. But Islamic civil law ceased to be the fundamental law of Syria after the first military coup d’État of 1949 staged by general Husni al-Zaim. It took al-Zaim and his entourage less than a month to dismantle a legal system centuries old. Al-Majalla was replaced by the Syrian Civil Code based on the newly promulgated Egyptian Civil Code of 1948, itself of French origin. The highest-ranking Islamic law judges were forcibly retired, and the Islamic law professor at the Syrian University was fired. Civil law courses at the university were totally revised in order to teach the new Syrian Civil Code. And of course, the Syrian legal system was in a state of chaos; neither the lawyers nor the judges had received training in the new code they now had to apply. This paper relates the struggle that politicians and jurists of the 1950s took up to reinstate Islamic law as the main source of legislation. It describes the changes to legal education which ensured that Islamic law was taught at the university, and that jurists trained in the tradition could continue to practice law. The presentation also relates how the political instability of successive military coups ultimately foiled attempts to restore a legal system founded on Islamic law. Finally, the paper describes events since the popular uprising of March 2011 in Syria, and the “renaissance” of Islamic law observed mainly in the north. Some lawyers, judges and prosecutors of the Syrian opposition supported attempts to apply Islamic law in the ad hoc courts they established in areas no longer under state control. Rather than interpret their actions as part of the political movement of Islamism that swept across Syria as of 2013, the paper demonstrates that their efforts to reinstate Islamic law mirrored the past attempts of legal professionals of the 1950s and 1960s to salvage their legal tradition. Primary sources include the Official Gazette of Syria, university textbooks and programs, Internet sources post-2011, and interviews conducted with Syrian legal professionals.