“The honest and trustworthy merchant will be among the martyrs on the Day of Resurrection.” So goes a variant of a well-known hadith, just one among many on the importance of business ethics that were widely circulating in the era of the spice trade. But how did the norms enjoined by such hadith and hadith commentaries operate, if at all, in the lively and long-distance commercial culture of the spice-trade in the 13th-16th centuries? Considering that some outstanding hadith scholars of this era amassed vast fortunes as prosperous merchants, did these worlds of profit and prophecy intersect in meaningful ways? And to what extent did the ever-widening flows of capital, goods, people, and disease across seas and oceans transform the way Muslim scholars understood such hadith on commercial matters and their call for what we might term a “moral economy”? This paper—a preview of a larger book project—will take up these questions by discussing a figure who best illustrates this convergence of trade and tradition: Ibn ?ajar al-?Asqal?n? (d. 1449), a learned hadith master and a textile and pepper merchant who was active among mercantile and hadith networks that linked the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. That Ibn ?ajar turned to the hadith to take up perennial problems related to managing the risks of long-distance commerce as well as the fortunes and debts that arose from its excesses may come as little surprise. And yet, as I argue, these problems took on a fresh urgency in this era, and the strategies and modes of ingenuity, translation, and discovery that he employed to address such problems reflect his embeddedness in an expanding and morally challenging world of global trade. In closing, I will situate Ibn ?ajar’s case in the context of other merchant-scholars from Málaga to Malacca. In this larger context we can observe the way that the spice trade generated revenues that supported the patronage of hadith scholarship as well as the ports and pathways through which the transmission of hadith and its commentaries flowed. But at a deeper level—and self-referentially—these hadith scholars teach us about the trading of norms about trade itself, and an opportunity to reflect on the way such norms were challenged, transformed, and upheld in historical practice.