This study has explored the circulation of Islamic legal ideas across the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean world in the second millennium, with a focus on the Shāfiʿī school of law. In the course of the analysis I have been contributing to five major historiographical streams with varying spatial and temporal concerns: global history of premodern law outside Europe, intellectual (dis)continuity in the postclassical phase of Islamic law; the history of Shāfiʿīsm; trajectories of Islam beyond the Middle East; and Shāfiʿīsm’s historical reception along the Indian Ocean littoral.