My paper, “Religio-legal Conceptualizations of Land Ownership in the Early Abbasid Period”, studies the work of early Muslim jurists, traditionists, and scribes in order to reconstruct their conception of land ownership. The first part of the paper develops a theoretical account of land ownership according to works like Ya?y? b. ?dam’s Kit?b al-Khar?j, Ab? Y?suf’s Kit?b al-Khar?j, M?lik b. Anas’s Muwa??a, Ab? ?an?fa’s Musnad, and al-Q?sim b. Sall?m’s Kit?b al-Amw?l. What did it mean to “own” land in the early Abbasid period? What was the difference between land owned by an individual, the Muslim community, and the caliphal regime? What was the prerogative of each of these groups vis-à-vis land; what could they do or not do, and according to which ethical or legal precepts? The second part of the paper provides a brief account of modern theories of property, and argues that due to their incommensurability, they should not be used as an analytical lens through which to understand premodern Islamic land ownership. With the development of capitalism and the rise of the modern state in the seventeenth century, property came to denote a set of enforceable rights including the right to sell, lend, bequeath, destroy, and most notably, exclude non-owners. Building on Locke’s understanding of unlimited property acquisition as a as a natural right, William Blackstone defined property as the “sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe”. Positioned at the intersection of legal philosophy and political theory, this paper accounts for the implications of the difference between these two regimes: modern property and premodern Islamic land ownership. It also contributes to the study of Islam in three ways. First, it represents an attempt to ground the study of Islamic law and politics in material reality. Second, it adds to a growing body of literature (by Michael Morony, Michel Campopiano, Marie Legendre, and Petra Sijpesteijn) on the role that land played in the history of early Islam. Finally, in light of the claim that land was not only the main instrument for wealth and power in the premodern world, but that, more specifically, its taxation was critical for the survival of the early Islamic state, it provides a nuanced and complex account of the legal understanding of land ownership in early Islam.