The last century
Obviously, the contributions of present-day Iranians to economics, as compared to those of modern Western economists or of medieval Persian scholars, are relatively insignificant.
Persia declined tremendously and lost its preeminence overall, including in intellectual pursuits, in the modern centuries, joining the ranks of many less-developed economies. However, having a tremendously significant intellectual history, it has seen a great deal of progress in various areas since the introduction of modernization at the beginning of the twentieth century — in literature, the sciences, and economics in particular as compared to many other less-developed societies.While most Iranian economists today are secular economists, some have been relatively active in a branch of Islamic social thought known as Islamic economics. Perhaps because of Islam's opposition to interest in banking, what has become known as Islamic economics began as an alternative to secular economics in the mid-twentieth century, and was created by three Islamist activists — Pakistani Islamist thinker A.A. Mamdudi (1903—79), Egyptian writer/activist and one of the early leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Brotherhood Seyyed Qutb (1906—66), and Iraqi Shiite cleric Mohammad Bagher Sadre (1931—80). These three founding fathers of Islamic economics were joined by various other true believers — both Sunni and Shiite — that have included those with secular economics training, and even those without it. For proponents of Islamic economics, the moral teachings of Islam provide the ethical guidelines needed for effective control of economic behavior, believing that both orthodox and heterodox paradigms in economics are inadequate for or incapable of explaining the real economic problems of the modern world.
Although several secular-trained Iranian economists, such as Abbas Mirakhor, have been active in Islamic economics since the 1980s, by far most active secularly trained economists engaged in that type of economics have been Pakistani, Bengali, Arab, and Indian Muslim economists.
Interestingly enough, Iranians active in this type of economics have mostly been non-economist Islamic activists. In fact, these Iranian writers began their work in Islamic economics in the 1970s, when Iranian Islamist activists joined the left and the nationalist forces in their opposition to monarchy.Iranians become active in the field of Islamic economics during the 1970s mostly for political reasons, due to the fact that in pre-1979 Iran, Marxism-Leninism, along with Mossadegh's brand of progressive/secular nationalism, had a great deal of appeal among Iranians. Marxism's appeal in pre-1979 Iran influenced Iranian Islamist activists in two different ways. On the one hand, left-leaning Islamists/organizations (the so-called Islamic Marxists), like proponents of Liberation Theology in Latin America, incorporated a great deal of Marxist-Leninist themes and concepts into their beliefs/ideological stands, arguing that these had also been emphasized by Shiite Islam.
The second group, what I call the reactive group, included more religious individuals who, disliking communism and Marxism, tried to provide responses to Marxian themes from an Islamic perspective. Those involved in the reactive group, with some exceptions like Iran's first Islamic President Bani Sadre, were typically theologians. It is interesting that all those writers usually began their essays/books with an Islamic critique and explanation of certain Marxian themes, rather than explaining their own thoughts about economics. As a result of the affinity of Iranian intellectuals with Marxism-Leninism, even the reactive group tried to incorporate some Marxist- Leninist themes in their writings/slogans. Examples are Ayatollah Khomeini's use of the (Leninist) themes of imperialism and oppressed/exploited classes, or Bani Sadre's statement in his Divine Economics that: “Islamic view of ownership is not in harmony with ownership under various class societies, and as will be shown below, Islam ended all forms of exploitation, and oppression aimed at usurping the fruits of the labor of workers.. (1979, 118).
Although such mixed ideologies are not always to be read literally, given the contemporary conflict over Iran's position in the Middle East, a greater understanding of the long and important history of Persian/Iranian economics is essential to fostering international dialogue.