This paper examines legal reform in Afghanistan during the reign of the late-19th Century state building monarch Amir Abd al-Rahman Khan (r. 1880-1901). Building on recent scholarship connecting Afghanistan's legal history to the Ottoman world, it argues that moving beyond the neat temporal and spatial frames that are traditionally used to study Islamic reform in state building projects across the region reveals new dimensions to how ideas of “modernity” and “tradition” were being constructed and wielded. In a familiar repertoire across the region reminiscent of King Muhamad Ali (r. 1805-1848) in Egypt and Sultans Mahmoud II (r. 1808-1839) and Abdulhamid I (r. 1839-1861) in the Ottoman Empire, Abd al-Rahman engaged in rapid bureaucratization: centralizing the courts, placing the state at the head of religious endowments (awqāf), initiating educational reforms, and instituting new forms of taxation, stamps, and, for the first time in Afghanistan’s history, passports. I situate these reforms within a transregional as well as historical context by examining contemporary court chronicles, legal manuals, and royal decrees explicitly for their intertextual links to Indian, Arab, and Ottoman debates, beginning in the early modern period, on legal reform. Examining the sources in this way shows how policies of the central state towards its citizens were part of a state-building project that did not represent a dramatic break with the Islamic past or with regional models of reform even as it radically changed the national landscape of Afghanistan. This was very much a transregional project, influenced by the Ottoman Empire, drawing on regional discourses, and gaining authority from connections to a broader Hanafi sphere, from the Middle East to South Asia. In some ways, this transregionalism was not new, but represented a centuries-long tradition of broad connectivity among Islamic scholars and legal schools, drawing on a legal logic that preceded the "colonial encounter". However, as the written content printed and disseminated in Afghanistan shows, it was being put into service of new goals: the protection of borders, the bureaucratization of elites, and the centralizing of authority generating new patriarchal structures.