In this talk, I will try to analyze the structural and conceptual changes made to Shari’a within the early twentieth century Ottoman social context through a scrutiny of a legal reform project proposed by Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924). For Ziya Gokalp’s project not only provided a representative template to observe the late Ottoman intellectual discursive trends on legal reform. But as a prolific thinker and political adviser for the Ottoman administration, he made prominent impact on shaping the intellectual predispositions and political reforms of the late Ottoman Empire. This talk will focus on Gokalp’s intellectual and political efforts to refashion Shari’a along the lines of newly emerging social ideals in order to respond to the modern socio-economic changes in the society; and try to make sense of why in his legal thought “family” emerged as the main site to instill social moral ideals. I basically argue that Gokalp’s project was an attempt of social engineering that would turn Shari’a, which was confined to familial issues, into a social technology to fashion new moral/ethical subjects laid within the collective social setting of “nation”. This talk in this framework attempts to analyze how and why in Gokalp’s discourse Shari’a was delimited within the ethical private sphere under the supervision of looming secular state. By examining Ziya Gokalp’s legal reform efforts, this talk seeks to figure out in what ways the reconfiguration of the family as a legal category juxtaposed it with new forms of disciplinary and moralizing techniques and discourses in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire. Along these lines this talk might help us to understand why the modern governmentalities targeted family as their object to regulate. I will in this regard try to understand how in the discursive level family came out to be seen as the private locus of morality within which modern subjectivities will be produced and in what terms modern imaginations of moral subject-formation processes differed from the ones understood and organized in Islamic traditions. This can contribute to our understanding of the changes in Shari’a’s moral and legal role in the familial and social levels in the Ottoman-Turkish context in particular, and in terms of modernity in general. A critical scrutiny of Ziya Gokalp’s thoughts on Islamic law might thereby help us to analyze how in the late Ottoman context Shari’a came to be defined as a “religious law” in the liberal model.