The transition from the traditional process of court authentication of property rights to a modern system of cadasters was evolutionary and incremental. Over the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century the modern state institutions imposed a series of reforms to the cadastral records. These reforms did not simply improve the efficiency of the system, they actually transformed the very understanding of the concept of property. Moving from a complex tradition involving over 20 types of tenure and usufruct rights to a simple process of ownership did more than organize the technical records, it changed the very notion of property and coincided with purposeful projects to forge a new a new class of property holders and tax payers in the service of the new state apparatus.  Through linking the process of land record documentation to major administrative and social transformation in the Levant in the Ottoman, into the French Mandate and post-colonial periods, the presentation will focus on the correlation between the rational spatial ordering and the political formation of the modern state. The question of ownership was always a contentious problem in Islamic jurisprudence that governed the production of social and political space. The presentation will thus also focus on how the process of modernizing the records confronted some of the challenges of defining property and how in the end it informed the process of secularizing the legal framework and challenging the religious institutions that controlled the mechanisms of legitimization for centuries. Yet the failure of the cadastral system to cope with increasingly more complex modern problems is signaling the limitation of the system itself, but more importantly, the limitation of the idealistic project of state building in the region. The issue of property is at the core of the social contract between citizens and state, this contract is fundamentally challenged today through the Arab Spring revolts and rebellions. Today the region is standing at the cross roads with various ideologies at play. The intertwining between the political, legal and socio-economic definition of property will help expand the dialogues on state building in the future.