This paper explores how the regulation of marriages and Islamic family laws became a predicament for the Ottoman state during the WWI. As the economic and social difficulties of the war struck the Ottoman women whose husbands were conscripted, the Hanafite legal rule precluded many Muslim women from annulling their marriages. The Ottoman bureaucracy was troubled by an outbreak of socio-legal problems caused by the religiously licit but officially unregistered marriage/divorce cases of the soldiers’ wives. The ruling party, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) also grappled with various legal cases regarding child marriage, polygamy and the intermarriages -particularly the ones between Armenian women and Muslim men. Therefore, the state’s failure to thoroughly control the religious marriages throughout the empire became a crucial source of disquiet for the CUP amid the adversities of the war. Having some serious misgivings about the compatibility of the Shari’a with the legal edifice of the modern state, the CUP elite codified the religious family laws in 1917 and imposed marriage registration and prenuptial licenses. Based on archival research of the reform of matrimonial laws and their repercussions 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 not thoroughly replacing it with a secular civil code. This paper takes such ambivalences of reform as a crucial historical moment to scrutinize the problem of Sharia’s commensurability with the secular state.