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.

This chapter compares the processes and outcomes of labor politics in post-uprising Tunisia and Morocco. It explores how institutional legacies from authoritarian rule created distinct opportunities for unions to exert influence over transitional governments and shaped their ability to secure meaningful political and economic reforms. The analysis underscores how historical legacies influence unions’ capacity to engage effectively in political transitions. It concludes by considering how institutional legacies might change.