History of Islamic Economic Thought

Economic practices and the search for solutions to economic problems have been a common concern of all societies at all times and existed long before there was any theorizing on the subject. Economic thought developed over the centuries because of the continuous interaction and convergence of the thoughts of different people from various parts of the world, which provided the necessary basis for the continuity of sciences and the development of ideas. Despite the resurgence in recent decades of many research studies and publications on the history of Islamic economic thought that highlight the contributions of various eminent medieval Muslim scholars, the contributions of early Muslim scholars to mainstream economics remain overlooked or deliberately ignored by most Western literature dealing with the history of economic thought. Generally speaking, most western historians of economic thought start with the Greek philosophers, the Roman jurists and some early Christian fathers who lived in the first centuries of the Christian era before jumping on to the writing of western thinkers in the late Middle Ages, thus leaving behind a ‘great gap’ of more than 500 years. This ‘great gap’, according to Joseph Schumpeter, in his famous book..