In 1832, Bishara al-Khuri had the unique distinction of becoming the first priest whom the Maronite Church assigned to study and master Islamic law. He would sit at the feet of religious scholars in Damascus, and soon afterwards return to Mt. Lebanon to assume his new duties as the chief Christian expert on Islamic law, for which he earned the sobriquet of ‘Christian mufti’. His career stands at a crossroads in Lebanese history that allows us to reexamine old assumptions about religion and law in the Middle East. Chief among them is that Middle Eastern legal systems have always been profoundly sectarian and divided. Inconveniently for this older model, research on Islamic court records over the past three decades has shown that non-Muslims routinely visited Islamic courts in the towns, which served as the pre-eminent forum of justice for urban populations. What this new research has not settled is the overall structure of the legal system, which is still conceived as a set of parallel courts for each religious community. The career of Bishara al-Khuri contains the outline of a more complicated framework, in which sectarian courts appear as the subsequent product of an Ottoman modernity distorted by European power. In al-Khuri’s youth, most litigation on Mt. Lebanon was still resolved by customary law. Muslim and Christian judges, whenever they intervened, acted primarily as informal arbiters. As al-Khuri came of age in the early nineteenth century, the Maronite Church was grappling with the consequences of a novel campaign promoted (1799) by Bashir II al-Shihabi, emir of the mountain, to enforce Islamic law throughout his domain. To comply with this order, the Maronite Church ultimately decided that it needed its own experts in Islamic jurisprudence, and hence sent off al-Khuri to be trained. The reaction of the church reveals a very different legal culture from what we have hitherto imagined. Far from defending its own ‘courts’, which did not really exist in any systematic form, it prepared to conform with the new dictates of the provincial administration. The construction of a sectarian system would commence only in later decades, which took al-Khuri’s career into unforeseen channels.