Members of the Muslim minority in the Philippines have a distinctive legal culture whose rules and customs are grounded in Islam. To address this situation of legal pluralism, the government in 1977 enacted a Code of Muslim Personal Laws, which stands alongside the Philippines Family Code and Civil Code and officially recognizes the principle of plural legal regimes for at least one minority cultural and religious group within the general population. This article, written by a participant in the legislative process, explores the complexities of conceptualizing and drafting the Code. These complexities include the use of ethnographic descriptions of customary law within the Muslim community, the selection of rules from among the different schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and the harmonization of conflicts between the laws now applicable to Muslims and non-Muslims in the Philippines.