Historians as well as Ottoman jurists often conceptualized Ottoman legislation as emanating from three distinct sources: “custom”, “Islamic law/Shari’a”, and “secular/state law.” This understanding has contributed to analyses of processes of modernization and secularization in Ottoman legal history. This paper will explore the constant blending of these sources in various legal arenas vying for control over the administration of property in the late nineteenth century. Using records from the Shari’a court as well as the tapu administration of one district of Ottoman Syria, I will analyze the ways in which nineteenth century land legislation relied on Shari’a concepts in a project to legalize existing practices of land tenure defined as customary, at the same time that it sought to legitimate expanding the bureaucratic state’s power to sanction control over land. I will show how this blending can be read both in relevant legislation and in the tapu registers and Shari’a court transactions that found their legitimacy in such legislation. At the same time, this paper will argue that the multiplicity of legal arenas in which this blending occurred in the late nineteenth century represents a contestation over the power to legitimate land control. The Shari’a Courts and the newly formed tapu offices both sanctioned control over land in late Ottoman Syria, even as provincial and central bureaucrats aimed to more precisely define their roles. This contested pluralism provided legal opportunities for Ottomans from all walks of life to assert their control over property. However, the central state was also able to legitimate its project to obtain land for its own purposes, in this case the settlement of refugees and the expansion of the land holdings of the Hamidian private treasury. The paper will therefore argue for conceptualizing legal change as a reflection of local and imperial struggles over legitimacy.