Conclusion

This chapter has presented a survey of the economic thought of four Arab-Islamic scholastics, who provided rather sophisticated discourses during the early medieval period, descriptive as well as analytical, on numerous economic issues, during the Schumpeterian “blank centuries.” The content of their discussions, positive as well as normative, is quite similar to that found in the writings of subsequent European-Latin scholastics of the late medieval period, especially so with respect to Al-Ghazali.

Much of the literature of these Arab scholastics was available to the European scholastics (e.g. Albertus Magnus, 1193—1280; St. Thomas Aquinas, 1225—74; Raymund Lull, 1232—1315; Duns Scotus, 1265—1308), directly or through translations and other avenues during the tenth to thirteenth centuries, from Arabic to Latin, just as there were extensive translations earlier into Arabic once the Greek heritage was re-discovered in the eighth century. Our modest effort provides evidence to support what Spengler suggested, in that, unlike the claim of “blank centuries,” economics occupied a distinct place in the writings of earlier Arab-Islamic scholars. The status of contemporary Islamic economics, with its blend of the sacred and the material, is more problematic when viewed from a Western modernist perspective, but has important influence across some regions of the world.