The book’s primary purpose is to highlight the Islamic legal doctrine regarding freedom of the seas and its implementation in practice, and to divulge how the rights of individuals are protected within and beyond the maritime boundaries and territorial jurisdiction of the state. The second objective is to prove that many of the fundamental principles of the premodern international law governing the legal status of the high seas and the territorial sea originated in the Mediterranean world, though they are not a necessarily European creation. The fading away of the Byzantine maritime hegemony, the Islamic military expansions on the eastern, southern, and western shores of the Mediterranean, and the Christian–Islamic naval rivalries over the Mediterranean Sea, particularly from the second half of the eleventh century CE onwards, undoubtedly gave rise to the introduction of unprecedented legal norms and rules governing the law of the sea, which subsequently prevailed across the world's oceans and seas.