------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (October 2004)
S.M. Ghazanfar, editor, _Medieval Islamic Economic Thought: Filling
the Great Gap in European Economics_. London: Routledge/Curzon, 2003.
xv + 284 pp. $115/=A355 (hardback), ISBN: 0-415-29778-8.
Reviewed for EH.NET by M. Umer Chapra, Islamic Research and Training
Institute of the Islamic Development Bank, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
Muslim contributions to economics have failed to be generally
recognized in the Western literature that deals with the history of
economic thought. This has led to the concept of a "Great Gap" of
"over 500 years" in the history of economic thought from the time of
the Greek contribution to that of the Scholastics. Joseph Schumpeter,
therefore, falsely assumed in _History of Economic Analysis_ (1954),
that this intervening period was sterile and unproductive. The
reality, however, is that the Muslim civilization had made rich
contributions to intellectual activity, including socio-economic
thought, and had thereby played a part in kindling the flame of the
European Enlightenment Movement. Even the scholastics themselves had
been greatly influenced by the contributions made by Muslim scholars.
The names of Ibn Sina (Avicenna, d. 1037), Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d.
1198), and Maimonides (d. 1204, the Jewish philosopher, scientist and
physician who flourished in Muslim Spain and then in Egypt.) appear
on almost every page of the thirteenth century summae (books written
by scholastic philosophers) (Pifer, 1978, p. 356). Todd Lowry rightly
points out in his foreword to the book under review that the
character and sophistication of Arabic writings on economic subjects
has been "generally ignored" (p. xi).
Since Schumpeter's book became a classic in economics, it led to a
"blind spot" in the history of economic thought (Mirakhor, December
1987, p. 248). This blind spot has persisted to this day, as is
evident from the reference by Douglass North, in his December 1993
Nobel lecture, to the "long hiatus between the end of the Roman
Empire in the West and the revival of Western Europe approximately
500 years later" (North, 1994, p. 365). It is difficult to understand
why these scholars have not realized what Abu Bakr al-Razi, the great
Muslim philosopher, scientist and physician (d. 925), understood more
than a thousand years ago -- that the history of knowledge is a
continuous process, building upon the foundations laid by former
generations of scholars (cited by Rosenthal, 1947, p. 68). If this
evolutionary process in human intellectual development had been
realized, Schumpeter and North may not have assumed the great gap or
hiatus of 500 years, but rather tried to discover the foundation on
which the Scholastics and other Western scholars built their
intellectual edifice.
However, Muslims themselves are also to be blamed for having failed
to adequately articulate their own contribution. Ghazanfar's book
will go a long way toward setting things right. Ghazanfar has been a
faculty member at the University of Idaho for the last 36 years. His
long experience in teaching conventional economics along with his
deep interest in Islamic economics makes him highly qualified to
write confidently on the contribution made by classical Muslim
scholars to economics. He has rendered a valuable service to the
academy by editing this enlightening book.
In addition to the foreword by Todd Lowry and the introduction by
Ghazanfar, the book contains fifteen papers, seven of which are by
Ghazanfar himself, four by him in association with A. Azim Islahi,
one by Paul Oslington, two by Hamid Hosseini, and one by M.
Nejatullah Siddiqi in association with Ghazanfar. These papers cover
in sufficient detail the contributions made by Abu Yusuf (d. 798) Abu
Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111), Ibn Taimiyyah (d. 1328.), Ibn Qayyim (d.
1350), and a number of other Muslim scholars like Ibn Hanbal (d.
855), al-Kindi (d. 873), al-Farabi (d. 950), Ibn Hazm (d. 1064),
Alberuni (d. 1048), Kay Kaus (d. 1082), Nizam al-Mulk (d. 1092),
Dimashqi (d. 1175), Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274), and Dawwani (d.
1501).
All these papers together help enlighten the reader on the
contributions made by these Muslim scholars to a number of economic
concepts like the market mechanism, demand, supply, prices and
profits, money, counterfeiting and currency debasement, labor supply
and population, and the role of the state and justice, peace and
stability in economic development. There is also a discussion of
economic thought in medieval Iran, the link between medieval Islamic
socio-economic thought and the Greek and Latin-European scholarship,
post-Greek/pre-Renaissance economic thought during the "Great-Gap"
centuries, and a comparison between the thought of Al-Ghazali and St.
Thomas Aquinas. The quality of the papers is on the whole quite good
and the book should go a long way in fulfilling its primary
objective, which is to highlight the Muslim contribution.
It is a little surprising that, even though the name of Ibn Khaldun
(d. 1406) is mentioned in several places in the book, there is no
full-fledged paper on this great scholar. Even though he lived after
the "Great Gap" period, his book, _Muqaddimah_, or Introduction [to
History], represents a crystallization of Muslim economic thought
before him. His insight into some economic principles was so deep
that a number of theories propounded by him nearly six hundred years
ago could undoubtedly be considered the forerunners of some more
sophisticated modern formulations of these theories. A number of
papers are available on Ibn Khaldun's contribution and at least one
or two of these could have been included in this book for the sake of
completeness. It would also have been helpful if the spellings of
scholars' names had been made uniform throughout the book. Different
spellings in different papers can create confusion in the mind of a
reader who is not familiar with these names.
The author deserves our compliments for this valuable contribution to
Islamic economics. It deserves to have a place in the library of not
only every college and university where history of economic thought
is taught, but also of individual scholars of economics concerned
with the evolutionary development of economic theories over the
centuries.
References:
Abbas Mirakhor, "The Muslim Scholars and the History of Economics: A
Need for Consideration," _American Journal of Islamic Social
Sciences_, December 1987, pp. 245-87.
Douglass C. North, "Economic Performance through Time," _American
Economic Review_, June 1994, pp. 359-68.
Josef Pifer, "Scholasticism," in _Encyclopedia Britannica_, 1978,
Vol. 16, pp. 352-55.
Franz Rosenthal, "The Technique and Approach of Muslim Scholarship,"
_Analecta Orientalia_ (Rome, Pontificam Institutum Biblicum, Vol. 24,
1974), pp. 1-73.
Dr. M. Umer Chapra is Research Adviser at the Islamic Research and
Training Institute of the Islamic Development Bank, Jeddah, Saudi
Arabia. He joined the institute in 1999 after retiring as Senior
Economic Adviser from the Saudi Arabia Monetary Agency where he
served for thirty-five years. He has authored a number of books and
papers. His most recent book is _The Future of Economics: An Islamic
Perspective_ (Leicester: Islamic Foundation, 2000).
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