In 1734, the Maronite bishop of Beirut, `Abdullah Qara`ali (d. 1742), finished nearly two decades of work in assembling a revised legal code for his church. My presentation will use this legal code, and the Lebanese society in which Qara`ali spent his career, to test older assumptions about law and society in the pre-modern Middle East. One advantage in looking at the territories around Mt. Lebanon is that the population was unusually diverse: alongside a large Maronite community were substantial numbers of Druze, Sunnis, Shiites, and Orthodox Christians. The former 'standard model' of law and society predicts that each of these groups ought to have had its own distinct laws and courts. Thanks to recent scholarship, this straightforward set-up no longer seems so tenable. We now know, for example, that non-Muslims frequently resorted to the Islamic courts, run by the Ottoman state, in towns throughout the empire. In addressing the Lebanese case, my presentation will try to throw the spotlight on rural settings, where 80-90% of the Middle Eastern population lived anyway. Qara`ali’s legal code (entitled Mukhtasar al-Shari`a), read together with local narrative sources, suggests that rural law was quite different from what the old 'standard model' would imagine. Among the most curious features of his 'church law' is its striking resemblance, in both structure and vocabulary, to Islamic law. How should we explain these convergences? The temptation is to conclude that, by the eighteenth century, Maronite law had somehow been 'Islamized' through prolonged contact with neighboring Muslims. My argument is that this position is a misstatement of a far more interesting cultural interaction. It obscures the broader legal culture that Muslims and Christians essentially shared. Rooted primarily in oral custom, this 'folk law' legitimized itself, among both Muslims and Christians, with a legal idiom derived from Islamic law. This patina of Islamic terminology, which reflected the prestige of the Ottoman political order more than the 'influence' of the shari`a, helped to mask local usages and place them beyond criticism. My presentation will lay out the structure of the legal system around Mt. Lebanon, and then look at examples of the handling of personal matters such as marriage and inheritance.