Revolutionary Command Council insisted that the transition system of governance would stay in place. According to Farhat Ziadeh, a mob instigated by "some army elements" assaulted al-Sanhūrī. One explanation put the assault to a publication by Al-Akhbār newspaper claiming that the Council of State "was about to issue decrees against the Revolution . . . (and) it had been rumoured that Dr al-Sanhuri was to become Prime Minister for the four months until the election of a constituent assembly". When Nasser called at the hospital in which al-Sanhūrī was receiving treatment for the injuries he sustained from the assault, al-Sanhūrī refused to see him. It is often claimed that al-Sanhuri was unable to leave Egypt following this incident. It is unclear whether al-Sanhūrī was placed under any house arrest. He is known to have briefly resided in Kuwait during 1959–60 to assist Kuwaiti legislators and politicians in different legislative projects. It has also been suggested that he visited Libya once again around that time (having briefly visited it for the first time in 1953) to assist in drafting and legislative exercises. Later life Most of al-Sanhūrī's later life was dedicated to the writing and publication of further volumes of Al-Wasīṭ. Nevertheless, in 1959, he was appointed, to Nasser's displeasure, as the director of the legal department at the Arab League's Institute of Arab Research and Studies (IARS) in Cairo, now administered by the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization. Al-Sanhūrī taught a course in comparative Islamic and Western law at the IARS. In 1970, on advice of Cairo University, Alexandria University and Ain Shams University, the Egyptian state awarded al-Sanhūrī its prize for social sciences and culture. Al-Sanhūrī died on 21 July 1971 at his home in Alexandria, and was buried in Heliopolis, Cairo. Method Al-Sanhūrī's major contribution to modern Arab legal and intellectual thought is his method of modernizing Islamic fiqh and sharia by reconciling rules and laws within Islamic Madhhabs with modern European jurisprudential concepts. The reason he resorted to European civil law and Western jurisprudence was not on identitarian or colonial premises, rather, it was on account of their highly elaborate and intellectualised character. This reconciliation is predicated upon an important distinction. According to al-Sanhūrī, the process of elaborating law and dispensing justice can only rightly operate when the ulama and the jurists are substantively distinguished: whereas the ulama are responsible for elaborating ibadat, that part