Review dates & the law update cycle

1What this page promises, and what it does not

This page is a review record, not a guarantee of accuracy. It exists because of an honest weakness: this site cites Acts, enactments and section numbers across dozens of pages, but until now it never told readers when each of those statements was checked, and how out of date it may already have become.

Three things this page promises:

• Every date on this page comes from a file or a record that was actually opened — not from memory and not from an estimate.
• Where something has not been checked against the main sources, it is listed in the Not verified section, not left out quietly.
• The review cycle is described as what actually happens, not as a schedule that reads well.

One thing this page does not promise: that every legal statement on this site is correct today. Islamic family law in Malaysia is state law, and 13 of the 14 applicable texts have not been read here.

2The legal sources: which ones, and in which dated version

Only one statutory text is stored in full with this site and read directly from it: Act 303. The front page of that text states its own version, and that line is quoted here exactly as written:

As at 1 January 2014

From the same front page: Date of Royal Assent — 27 June 1984; Date of publication in the Gazette — 28 June 1984; Latest amendment made by Act A1261 which came into operation on — 1 November 2010; and earlier reprints in 2001 (the first), 2005 (the second) and 2006 (the third).

Everything else is a secondary source: the name and year of an instrument, official leaflets, international documents, journals and news reports. The table below states each one and its actual status.

3Why reading the main text matters: four things that changed

This review cycle is not a ceremony. On 5 October 2026, reading the text of Act 303 itself — and not a summary of it — changed four things on this site. All four had been written wrongly here before that, and that is why this page exists.

4A Federal Territories section is not your section

In Malaysia, Islamic family law is a state matter. Each state has its own enactment, its own courts, its own forms and fees — and its own section numbers. Act 303 applies in the Federal Territories only.

The table below is what this site knows: the name and year of the instrument for 14 jurisdictions, and the polygyny permission section number as this site states it. The last column is the most important part to read — whether that text has actually been read here.

5What is reviewed, how often, and by whom

This section is written so that no reader is left with the wrong impression. This site is maintained by a single owner. There is no editorial board, no named panel of scholars, and no Syarie lawyer who reviews before publication — the absence of such a panel is itself still listed as an open gap in this site's gap register.

The actual review cycle: no monthly schedule and no quarterly schedule is carried out. A review happens when a change is noticed or reported, it is then run in full across all page files at once, and the result is recorded as a dated log kept with the page files. That is the cycle. It is no tidier than that, and writing it up as tidier than that would be one more statement that cannot be checked.

What is checked in each round: the numbers and wording of Quranic verses; hadith numbers and gradings; statutory section numbers together with their subsections; statistical figures and their arithmetic; and agreement between pages, so that two pages do not state two different things.

The table below is the logs that exist, with the dates as written on each log itself.

6What triggers a review outside the cycle

Because there is no dated cycle, what drives a review matters more than a schedule. The five things below trigger an immediate review of the affected part, rather than waiting for the next round.

7Not verified against the main sources

This table is the most useful part of this page, and the least comfortable to write. Each row is a legal statement on this site that was still open in this site's internal gap register on 5 October 2026 — that is, not verified against the statutory text or an official source.

The rows below are not a complete list of everything that could be checked; they are the list of what has already been identified and admitted to be unverified. What has not yet been identified, no one can list — ourselves included.

8If you find an error

A good report changes a sentence faster than a review round does. Use the Ask page, and if you can, include these four things:

• Which page — its address, for example /negeri.
• Which sentence — quote it, so there is no misunderstanding about what is meant.
• What it should be — the correct section number, wording or figure.
• The official source that shows it — an enactment, a department leaflet, or a link to an official site.

A report without a source is still useful: it becomes a row in the gap register and is marked not verified, rather than discarded. But a report with a source can be corrected the same day.

This site does not ask for your personal details in order to accept a correction.

Sources & references