Chapter 4 turns to legal maxims, the second core element of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s legal philosophy. Beginning with a survey of the evolution of maxim terminology in Shāfiʿī law from the third/ninth to the fifth/eleventh century, I show that Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām was influenced by maxim-based legal reasoning in the works of prominent Khurasani Shāfiʿī jurists. He applied their analytic method to develop his own maxims, which he extracted from substantive law and then used them to analyze the purposes and values of the law discursively. Within Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s legal philosophy, maxims constitute a bridge between the established body of legal precedents and the abstract discourse about the telos of the law as the realization of human well-being.

Chapter 3 focuses on Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s theorization of maṣlaḥa, one of the two core features of his legal philosophy. I first sketch the evolution of maṣlaḥa in the Shāfiʿī school in the centuries before Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām and then analyze his own theory of maṣlaḥa, its underlying moral philosophy, its legal normativity, and its debt to Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s Khurasani Shāfiʿī predecessors. The chapter also considers the challenges to the law’s rationality and morality in the Damascene milieu that likely motivated Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s development of his theory of maṣlaḥa.

The introduction explores the idea of an Islamic legal philosophy within the broader history and historiography of Islamic thought. It situates Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s career and reputation in historical and contemporary sources and situates his contribution in the fields and debates of Islamic intellectual and legal history. It explains the importance of the study and the key contributions it makes. Finally, it presents an overview of the sources used in the study and an outline of each of the book’s chapters.

The conclusion examines how elements of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s legal philosophy were advanced, reconstituted, or sidelined in the centuries after his death until the present day. It argues that the compilations of maxims, distinctions, and ashbāh spawned by Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s project share inextricable connections and are, together, functionally constitutive of Islamic legal philosophy as a single discipline; and therefore, that none of them can be meaningfully studied in isolation. It also reconstructs how interest in Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s project was rekindled and his legacy contested amidst debates about Islamic legal reform in the twentieth century.

Chapter 1 describes the restoration of Damascus in the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries under successive Seljuk, Zangid, and Ayyubid dynasties, with a focus on the revival of religious and intellectual life in the city through the patronage of political elites and the influx of scholars from other parts of the Muslim world. The chapter traces the formation of two competing Shāfiʿī legal traditions in Damascus. The dominant and longer-established tradition was formalist, traditionalist, and transmission-oriented, and it combined centuries-old indigenous Damascene scholarly culture with the Iraqi Shāfiʿī tradition, which had taken root in Damascus starting in the second half of the fifth/eleventh century. The second minority tradition drew on the Khurasani strand of Shāfiʿism, which had arrived in Damascus in the second half of the sixth/twelfth century, and it was more analytical, exploratory, and rationalist in orientation.

Chapter 2 examines Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s life in Damascus, with an emphasis on his intellectual formation. I reconstruct his formative influences in the Damascene milieu to show that he was a prominent representative of Khurasani Shāfiʿism who was linked to that tradition through his teachers, the works he studied and taught, and the ideas of leading Khurasani Shāfiʿīs that he adopted and transformed. Beyond shedding light on Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s life, the biographies of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, his teachers, and his contemporaries illuminate the politics of Ayyubid state patronage and call into question the depiction of post-Abbasid scholars on the state payroll as quietist and obsequious to the political establishment.

Chapter 6 traces the influence of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s legal philosophy both during his lifetime and after his death. Its impact is visible in the scholarship of his students and in the continuing transmission, circulation, and teaching of his ideas and writings across regions and legal schools. I attribute the enduring appeal of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s legal philosophy to the novel legal concepts and forms of legal reasoning that he introduced and developed and that were subsequently taken up by his students and their intellectual descendants. These concepts have given rise to dedicated literatures that evolved into diverse genres whose genealogies, I argue, can be traced back to Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s Qawāʿid.

Chapter 5 returns to Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s biography to examine his attempts to embody, apply, and disseminate his legal philosophy among diverse classes: scholars, students of the law, and a non-specialist public in Damascus and later in Cairo, where he retired. I demonstrate that Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s public activism and frequent embroilment in political controversy are best understood as manifestations of these efforts. I outline the connections between his legal philosophy and the socioreligious goals he pursued, highlighting the continuity between his theoretical scholarship and his embodied activism.

The final chapter addresses humanity’s relation to the divinely revealed will (sharʿ). Turning to the works of Ibn Rushd, the author argues first that a conception of fiṭra as a natural division of intellectual aptitude clarified Ibn Rushd’s arguments regarding the proper approach to revelation: it is to be twofold, one appropriate for the elites and one for the general populace. As a result, his understanding and use of the term shares much with his predecessors: it assumes and perpetuates a vision of humanity as divided by natural endowments and one that has implications for the shape of the ideal society as hierarchical. However, beyond this continuity with previous philosophical thought, Ibn Rushd’s understanding and use of fiṭra also point to a transition. In contrast with his predecessors, Ibn Rushd claims explicitly that all humans can access basic religious truths through their fiṭra. Such a reading of fiṭra appears to connect with the more levelling and religious thought of the scriptural interpreters as well as later, prominent theologians who continue to exert an influence over the widespread understanding of fiṭra today. Connecting to but also developing the work of his predecessors and successors, Ibn Rushd illustrates most clearly the kind of interplay of both continuity and change that characterizes the philosophers’ approach to fiṭra.

The Ottomans had a variety of ways of dealing with non-Muslim foreigners. In theory, Islamic law assumed a constant state of war between Muslim and non-Muslim rulers, but in practice, long-term peace arrangements were possible and even common. In terms of diplomacy, the Ottomans’ instruments and peacemaking procedures were similar to those of the West, the Turks likewise building on established customs and practices from the Byzantine period and beyond. The ahdnames were particularly important for international relations; originally unilateral documents, they evolved into more reciprocal instruments, only to become more unilateral again in the second half of the seventeenth century. In theory, peace with unbelievers should be temporary, but in practice, the duration of treaties concluded by the Ottomans reflected their assessment of the likelihood of hostilities resuming; in the case of countries that did not pose any military threat to the sultan’s domains, peace could even be concluded indefinitely. As long as both sides maintained the friendship between the two parties, there was no need to fear the Turks. The interconnected phenomena of slavery and privateering regularly put a strain on this friendship, as men, women and children on both sides were dragged off and sold as chattel. This loss of life and property sometimes led to international incidents, in which the Ottoman authorities made it clear that the basic Islamic parameters of peace could not be ignored with impunity.

Sohail Hanif provides a detailed examination of the complex legal debates surrounding women’s inheritance in Islam, particularly within the Hanafi school of law (madhhab). The chapter emphasizes how these debates are highly nuanced, requiring an understanding of how Islamic law balances financial responsibilities between genders, ensuring that what women might seemingly lose in inheritance is offset by their entitlement to maintenance.

This chapter looks at the different ways in which a free person might come to forfeit their freedom in the late antique and early Islamic Middle East. Although frowned upon and theoretically illegal, free persons might opt, due to extreme poverty or privation, to sell themselves or their family, offering their labor in return for basic sustenance. Otherwise, loss of free status might occur due to a debt default, which, if the sale of a debtor’s assets realized insufficient credit, could see them being forced to work to pay off what they owed. This solution was common in the fouth–eighth centuries, but by the ninth century it was increasingly deemed unacceptable. This chapter considers what led to this shift in legal thinking, the degree to which Islamic law continued late antique practice and the nature of this continuity.

This chapter provides an overview of how various aspects of sexuality are dealt with in different Islamic traditions. If first looks at the Qur'an, the Sunna and pre-modern Islamic legal sources. It then focuses on how some medical and erotological sources dealt with the issue in the past, and finally looks at how contemporary feminists are pushing back against patriarchal interpretations of Islamic traditions. The chapter argues that pre-modern texts can help explain how sexuality is understood in contemporary Muslim-majority societies, where continuities are as striking as ruptures, especially when coming to religious or legal sources. It also reminds us of the danger of essentialism, oversimplification and lack of historical contextualization when looking at Islamic and religious traditions in general.