The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a survey of economic thought originating with some Arab-Islamic scholars whose writings extend over several (medieval) centuries.
The term “Arab-Islamic” is to be broadly interpreted. Several Islamic scholars had their origins in Persia (part of the Seljuk Dynasty, 1038—1194), others in Abbasid Baghdad, and yet others in the Mediterranean Al-Andalus (Islamic Spain).
The word “Arab” may be viewed not so much as relating to a scholar's geographical origins, conceived in terms of the nation-states that now exist in the contemporary Middle East, but more to the fact that Arabic was the main language of their scholarship. Aside from being the language of the Holy Qur'an, Arabic was the lingua franca of the era, “the main vehicle of culture” (Sarton, II, 109). Even several Jewish scholars wrote their major works in Arabic (e.g. Moses Maimonides, 1135—1204; Ibn Gabirol, 1021-58).Specifically, the chapter will focus firstly on four such scholars who wrote on economic matters during the pre-Renaissance period, before the emergence of Latin scholastic economics typically associated with St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). Then the chapter will discuss some salient features of what has come to be known as Islamic economics, much in discussion in recent decades.
It is appropriate to note the notion of the historical “gap” that has been promoted in intellectual history, which has been the stimulus for several papers on the subject (Ghazanfar, 1991, 2003). Joseph Schumpeter propounded the “great gap” thesis in his History of Economic Analysis. After arguing that the “study of doctrinal history” is “historically conditioned,” he suggested that while “economic thought started with the Greeks” over 2,000 years ago, “many centuries within that span are blanks,” until Latin-Scholasticism emerged with St. Thomas Aquinas (Schumpeter, 1954, 4-6, 52). That is, for over 500 years, nothing of any significance to economics was discussed anywhere else. As one scholar noted, such a stance is “all the more disappointing,” as Schumpeter “must have been well aware of the fascinating process of cultural diffusion” between the Arab-Islamic civilization and Europe (Bernardelli, 320). Thus, Schumpeter perpetuated a well-embedded tradition in the literature: a denial of literary history to the rest of the world, specifically to the early Islamic world, although lately there is some acknowledgement of Muslim scholars' economic thought in mainstream texts (Landrem and Colander).