How to Study Islamic Economics as a Science in Reference to the Qur′an and the Sunnah

Abstract

Islamic economics began around 70 years ago with the works of some Indian scholars in the field. The King Abdulaziz University Center for Islamic Economics records the origin of the contemporary approach to the study of Islamic economics to be 30 years ago. The works of the great Islamic scholars, the mujtahids, such as Imam Ghazali, Ibn Taimiyya, Imam Shatibi, Ibn Qayyim, and Ibn Khaldun, recorded the study of Islamic economic and social problems either in reference to the Qur′an and prophetic teaching, the sunnah, or independent of these as intellection borrowed from Greek social and economic thoughts. The latter examples are of Ibn Khaldun (Rozenthal, 1958) and the Muslim philosopher of Greek vintage, Al-Farabi (Waltzer, 1985). The use of the terminology “Islamic economics” is an imitation of contemporary times. It reflects the classification of educational disciplines left to us by the Occidental world. Such classification was devoid of the holistic beginnings of intellectual thought in which all Muslim scholars had drowned themselves in the search of knowledge, not of this or that discipline, but of all disciplines as a holistic methodological worldview…