This paper explores the Ottoman state’s efforts to regulate the Islamic family laws in the early twentieth century. Rather than seeing the late Ottoman legal reform as a well-thought-out and organized state project, I focus on the pragmatic and ephemeral strategies the Ottoman state employed in reforming Sharia as part of its growing bureaucratic anxieties about the supervision of marriages and religious laws throughout the empire. After the codification of civil laws in 1870s, Shari’a was practically confined to the legal domain of family affairs in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman bureaucracy had been troubled by an outbreak of socio-legal problems caused by the religiously approved but officially unregistered marriages, such as the marriages of the soldiers’ wives during the WWI. Therefore state’s lack of legal control over religious marriages due to Sharia’s relative autonomy became a crucial concern for the Young Turk regime after 1913. Having serious misgivings about the compatibility of Shari’a and the modern state, the Young Turk elite got caught in the middle of a conflict over the reform of matrimonial laws. How would the Ottoman state fulfill legal reform in the domain of family, which, for the Ottoman ulema and the reformers alike, had constituted the core of Sharia and undergirded the national moral values? Proposed as a viable solution for the effective supervision of marriages, the Young Turk regime codified the religious family laws in 1917, and put criminal codes into use to impose marriage registration and prenuptial licenses. Based on archival research of the reform of matrimonial laws and their unintended consequences in everyday life, this paper examines how the Ottoman state encompassed marriage with a new evidential regime to monitor and regulate the private lives of its citizens. By doing so, the Ottoman state undertook an ambivalent role in undercutting Sharia’s jurisdiction through a series of legislation while simultaneously maintaining it to uphold new national ideals of family. This paper takes such ambivalences of reform as a crucial historical moment to scrutinize the problem of commensurability between Sharia and the modern state. It also aims to acknowledge the historical contingencies behind the Ottoman state’s increasing involvement in the governance of the religious laws and the family.