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.

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.

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.

Merchants and travelers sought food, lodging, entertainment, care, and other services in Nombre de Dios, Panama and Portobello, as well as at the inns punctuating the land and water routes between them. Sometimes accompanied by husbands and more often by slaves, enterprising women of diverse ancestry offered a range of services across the isthmus. In contrast to Seville or Malaga, Panama’s authorities, like those of New Spain, avoided regulating prostitution. Instead, they protested the unlicensed migration of unattached women from Castile and the sexual abuse of enslaved women. Sources described prostitution, like debt or enslavement, as a temporary misfortune.

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.