Panama’s most important festivity, the annual Corpus Christi processions, featured the performance of gender and ethnicity. Celebrations involved Congo, Biafara, Bran, and other Black confraternities, as well as a longstanding dispute for precedence between members of the ship-builders’ and the stocking-makers’ guilds, who struggled for proximity to the monstrance. The most dramatic dispute in the Cathedral, however, entailed a battle for precedence between the wives of the city councilors and the spouses of the royal judges. Controversy over seating arrangements enabled the judges and city councilors to submit conflicts over their respective status to the king, who eventually allowed the judges’ wives, and even their mothers, to receive communion in the main chapel.

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 Body of Christ and the Immaculate Conception involved diverse groups of Africans, Indigenous Americans, Europeans, and their descendants in dynamic, often contested, roles and positions within the Hispanic Monarchy. Deliberately incorporating women and men of different ethnicities or “nations,” the crown and church needed them. The Empire, understood as a long-distance framework for government, communication, exchange, evangelization, and profit, depended upon the far-flung populations that informed and transformed it. Origins, gender roles, legal status, relations, and experience shaped, without determining, interactions, rootedness, and mobility.

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.

From the beginning of human history, slavery and religion have been linked. Slaves have been forced to serve religious hierarchies. Religious doctrine has often set out who might be enslaved and justified that slavery. Yet religious ideas and motivations also led people of faith to restrict the scope of slavery and ease the lives of slaves in ages past, and religious groups were at the center of the successful abolitionist movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Unknown to many, the tangled and varied connections between religion and slavery continue today. Religious groups play a vital role in the fight against contemporary slavery, yet religious identity is still being used to facilitate enslavement, in several ways and in many countries. In this Introduction, we sketch the structure of our book and then treat three preliminary questions: How bad was ancient slavery? How bad is modern slavery? And what do we mean by “slavery”?

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.

How are religious groups helping in the fight against contemporary slavery, and how might they help more? In this chapter, we discuss the current state of the antislavery movement, providing examples of successful antislavery work and noting persistent challenges. We then chronicle the important contribution of numerous faith-based antislavery groups and leaders, including International Justice Mission, Love146, Unseen, the Medaille Trust, Talitha Kum and the work of Catholic Religious Sisters, Swami Agnivesh and the Bonded Labour Liberation Front, FAAST, the Santa Marta Group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, and Stella Maris. We close with a call for religious individuals and groups to increase their efforts to fight contemporary slavery.

Like the body of Christ, the Virgin Mary’s purity became a matter of social inclusion and cohesion. Until the late sixteenth century, the absence of a female religious community made marriage or migration the most “respectable” alternatives for women of means in Panama. The foundation of the Convent of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in 1597 created another option for women with economic resources and administrative capabilities. Accompanied by slaves and servants, these women successfully opposed a royally appointed bishop in the 1620s. Led by doña Ana de Ribera and Sor Beatriz de la Cruz, also known as doña Beatriz de Isásiga, the community secured donations in order to construct a water reservoir. A high-quality supply of fresh water enabled the nuns to increase their community’s income and avoid the city’s most important health hazards, while demonstrating its purity.

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.

Sixteenth-century efforts to abolish indigenous slavery informed precedents for Africans and their descendants seeking freedom on the isthmus. The monarchy’s efforts to combat maroonage by establishing free indigenous and African settlements highlight plural and shifting affiliations. At the same time, migrants from Nicaragua and Peru joined others from the Rivers of Guinea (many described as Zape, Biafara, or Bran) and a growing population of “Angola”, between slavery and freedom. Bureaucratic efforts to differentiate groups revealed cultural and biological mixture among them. Although some Spaniards made provisions for their children with Indigenous and African women to travel to Castile, many marriageable offspring of mixed unions chose to remain in Panama, where they could to draw upon maternal as well as paternal kinship networks. Some of these women entered a first-generation colonial elite that did not present itself as mixed. In this sense, “disappearance” of the area’s indigenous population belied the incorporation of some of its members and their descendants into the local oligarchy.

The ruins of Panamá Viejo’s Cathedral, with a tower symbolizing the national past, provide a popular site for weddings and other events during the “dry season” from January through April. In 2017, however, such celebrations took place elsewhere. With support from the European Research Council (ERC CoG 648535) and the Patronato Panamá Viejo, local workers, university students, archaeologists, and bioanthropologists undertook research-driven excavations in the Cathedral nave. The results, meticulously recovered and analyzed, proved even more surprising than the team’s bottom-up approach to the first European settlement on America’s Pacific Ocean (see Map I.1 and Figure I.1).

According to most accounts, the Spanish conquest decimated and nearly obliterated the region’s Indigenous populations. Genetic evidence from the isthmus, nevertheless, has pointed to an 80% indigenous maternal legacy in Panama’s present-day population. While common in Central and South America, sex-biased admixture led to the legal exportation of enslaved indigenous males but not females from the isthmus, reflecting and reinforcing the invaders’ dependency on local women’s labor and knowledge. Further evidence that the indigenous or Cueva population did not simply disappear comes from historical records of indigenous women’s unions with Spanish and African men. When consensual, such alliances provided newcomers pursuing “the secrets of the land” commercial and military aid. While relying upon such support, Spanish rarely recorded the importance of marriage, warfare, and trade for affirming legitimacy in the region, and even more rarely acknowledged the value of polygamy, polyandry, and matrilineal inheritance in the societies they encountered.