Asma Kanafani died in 1931, nearly twenty years after her husband. A Druze woman from the village of Jaramana near Damascus, Kanafani's legatees were her son, Fakhri, who inherited (directly or indirectly) the bulk of his parents' estate, and her daughters, Fawziyya and 'Atiyya, who received a few gold pounds. The inequitable distribution of the estate sparked a legal battle that lasted for years. The dispute was fought out in two separate and competing jurisdictions. Fakhri's claim was validated, and confirmed on appeal, by the Druze religious courts for the mandate territories. Fawziyya and 'Atiyya took their case to the Syrian civil courts--which, in matters of personal status, applied sharia law as the 'common law'. Sharia provisions guaranteed female children a fixed share of their deceased parents' estate. The Syrian courts duly found, and confirmed on appeal, that the Kanafani will was invalid, and insisted that their land should be registered under the names of all three children, not under Fakhri's alone. Both sides were engaged in the time-honoured legal tradition of 'forum shopping': selecting the court most likely to return a favourable judgment. But by doing so, they also created the conditions for a seemingly irreconcilable jurisdictional clash between the Druze religious courts and Syria's civil courts, and posed an awkward problem for the French High Commission, in whose archives details of this case are preserved. The Druze courts were keen to assert their own authority, within the Druze community and against other institutions in the mandate territories. This suited the High Commission, since French policy was to maximize the institutional segregation of Syrians by religious group. But, notwithstanding this policy, the mandate system tended to consolidate nation-state institutions in Syria: two such institutions, the Syrian civil courts, and the ministry that oversaw them, tried to use this case to assert their jurisdiction over all Syrians. The Kanafanis, as Syrians and/or as Druzes, were the objects of these conflicting institutional frameworks that characterized the mandate. But their case shows that those institutions could only function, and acquire the normative status desired for them by Druze religious leaders and French officials on the one hand, and functionaries and politicians within the Syrian state on the other, insofar as individuals like the Kanafani siblings chose to interact with them. A micro-historical focus on the case thus illuminates many larger issues (and contradictions) in the peculiar nature of mandatory rule.