When the Turkish parliament passed legislation in November 1928, adopting a new Latin-based Turkish alphabet to replace the “old” Ottoman Turkish alphabet based on Arabic/Persian letters, Turkish citizens found themselves in a process of change concerning their reading and writing abilities, skills, and habits. The Law required a rapid transition into the new alphabet in all areas of reading, writing, education, and publishing. Whereas earlier scholarship generally focused on the political, institutional, and ideological dimensions of this nationalist reform project, more recent scholarship has begun to move away from a state-centric approach and has considered the actual social processes and effects at the individual level of this ambitious reform act. Recent research (including my own) has demonstrated that alphabet change ushered in a wide range of responses and that it required adaptation on an individual level that was distinct from an ideologically or politically motivated opposition. The current paper contributes to this evolving line of scholarship by examining how the religious education of Turkish children in the old letters became an area of everyday contestation between the state and families and communities in the late 1920s and 1930s. Since children were seen as the nation’s future, state authorities were adamant about teaching the new generation the new alphabet and were equally interested in preventing them from learning the old alphabet. While schools began using the new Turkish alphabet in the 1928-1929 academic year, the informal neighborhood Qur’an courses held in mosques and private homes became a fiercely contested site between a state determined to socialize children into secular nationhood (in part) by preventing them from learning the Arabic letters, and families and imams who were committed to give children religious education (a process that involved the study of the Arabic alphabet so that the Qur’an could be read and studied in its original Arabic). Combining primary source data from previously untapped Ministry of Interior documents concerning the monitoring in Anatolian towns of these informal courses and their providers with insights from the subaltern school on everyday forms of resistance as well as the recent scholarship on secularism in Turkey (such as the works of Umut Azak and Gavin Brockett), this paper sheds light on a dimension of the 1928 alphabet reform that ties together questions of alphabet change, national and religious identities, education, and childhood. It thus contributes to the scholarship on the social processes of secular nation-building in Turkey.