My goal in this paper is to discuss the changes underwent by the Palestinian sharia courts in the pre-mandate years (1917-1922) following administrative decisions made by the British authorities concerning the legal system they inherited from the Ottoman Empire. I will argue that during these five years, the colonial administration turned the sharia courts into Muslim communal courts for personal issues. This was a major change. Historians of Islamic law tend to perceive the Ottoman legal reforms of the nineteenth century as a turning point in the status of the sharia courts (and Islamic law, as a whole), when their jurisdiction was restricted for the first time to family law and personal status. Subsequent changes in the post-Ottoman nation states are thus perceived as a "natural" continuation of an overall process of marginalization. I argue, in contrast, that the Ottoman sharia courts were not on their way to marginalization when the Ottoman Empire lost the war and eventually, shrunk into a Turkish nation state. Granted, the new Ottoman Family Law (October 1917) included for the first time changes in substantive sharia family laws, but certain aspects of this code indicate that the Ottoman legislature did not mean to reduce in this way the role of the sharia courts in the Ottoman judicial system; on the contrary. At least in the Palestinian case, the change in the status of the sharia courts following the defeat of the Ottoman army was an immediate outcome of measures taken by the British administration, aimed at restructuring the judicial system in Palestine. I will present in this paper preliminary findings from my current research, which explores the dynamics that shaped the transformation of the sharia courts during these formative five years. My sources include Palestinian sharia court records, documents from Müftüluk (the archive of ?eyhülislam), Ba?bakanl?k (the Ottoman state archive), and the British National Archive.