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.

The introductory chapter (Chapter 1) looks at historiographical problems in both Islamic history and the intellectual history of the Late Ottoman period, with sections including a review of the literature, a discussion of the construction of Islam as a world religion in nineteenth- and twentieth-century public and scholarly discourse in the West, an examination of the discourse of Ottoman and Islamic ’decline’ and how Islamic modernism and Salafism relate to that discourse, and a review of the Late Ottoman problematisation of Islam as a social and political category.