A Glossary of Islamic Heritage in Economic Thought

• Introduction:

At the end of the second century AH, some hints of economic thought began to appear in Islamic literature and writings. This occurred naturally and independently, even though jurisprudence, hadith, and other Sharia sciences had dealt with various financial questions before, especially in devotional and moral matters. Although this literature is scarce, it does an excellent job of studying and comparing the provisions of devotional transactions, which are mainly included in books of jurisprudence, and what we could call the financial policies of the ummah, at the level of individuals and systems.

Despite interest in implementing and reproducing the most important of these literary works, there has been no comprehensive modern project that explores the features, activities, and paths of this type of literary thought. It first appeared at the end of the second century AH and continued to develop until the fall of the Islamic Caliphate, but this path has not been traced. It could be, though, by monitoring and tracing the contributions made by Muslim scholars to economic thought through books on money and taxes, as well as other similar works that included economic content and rules to be adopted in financial transactions and the like. Presenting and analyzing the main ideas of such works through a contemporary economic lens could be useful, but there have barely been a few individual efforts addressing some books and analyzing them through such a lens. Among these are mainly the books of Dr. Refaat Al-Sayyed Al-Awadi, which include The Scientific Heritage of Muslims in Economics: Rational Arab Contributions, among others.

Interest in Islamic heritage in general has not extended in any way to interest in this specific domain of economic thought, which is the subject of this work.

• Description and importance of the glossary:

The primary goal of the glossary is to become a scientific reference, a database for researchers studying Islamic heritage and economic thought. It also aims to revive Islamic heritage and emphasize Muslims’ contributions to economic thought, contrary to Western but also Arab claims of Western hegemony in this field. These deny that economic thought existed before the emergence of the methodology of modern economics. In addition, the glossary attempts to best represent the role that Muslims played in the intellectual development of this field. All of these goals serve to promote a larger objective: refusing to occupy a position of inferiority to the West and refusing to fall into the arms of another civilization.

In order to do this, a great deal of information on Islamic heritage needs to be brought back into circulation so that Muslims’ scientific and intellectual contributions to the cumulative development of economic studies can be highlighted. Even the definition of “cumulative” needs to be addressed: the newer being based on what came before, refining and broadening concepts passed down from generation to generation. No matter the mutations that occur in science, knowledge is incontrovertibly based on previous developments and always triggers new series of potential developments.

In that sense, the glossary depends primarily on listing and identifying the most important heritage books on Islamic financial thought, with a focus on issues that were considered scientific and that had real impact on the course of Islamic history. This can be done by presenting, explaining, and analyzing the ideas traced in these works, and then comparing them to their relative contemporary uses, methodologies, and concepts, be that related to science or custom. It also takes into account quantitative historical distribution, as well as quantitative distribution according to scientific topic. The goal of this is to reread these ideas to better reproduce them and research how to reemploy or develop them.

The glossary also has the secondary goal of drawing attention to the importance of glossary composition and its role in developing scientific research, thus contributing to the development of economic research and analysis while studying the environment surrounding writers—and how this impacts their ideas on economics.

• Division of the glossary:

The glossary includes a set of studies on the most important heritage books on economic thought. We do not discuss the books themselves, rather the most important economic ideas listed within them. The studies are not meant to be book reviews; they consist instead of analytical economic research on the ideas presented in these books.

It should be noted that most of the books mentioned in the glossary mainly touch on jurisprudence, i.e. the legitimacy of authorship and presentation, but they are of an economic nature. There is no conflict in discussing jurisprudence and carrying economic implications. Indeed, these works could be classified as economic jurisprudence in an almost contemporary sense. The research conducted for this glossary was distributed into six main sections: taxes, money, Sharia policy, pricing, endowments, and values and interdependence.

Taxes: this includes the financial revenues obtained on land – land tax – be it Kharaj (meaning it entered the possession of the ummah by conquest) or ‘Ushriyyah (meaning it entered the possession of the ummah not through conquest). Each of these categories has its own conceptions and different types of cases and is interpreted differently by faqihs according to the historical practices of the caliphs.

Money: this includes the financial revenues obtained not through land, such as alms, zakat, jizya, expenditures, and financial investments (specific taxes), as well as other categories of revenue that could be described as financial income.

Sharia policy: this includes the financial policies related to the state, not to absolute rule and politics.

Pricing: this is the broadest field of numismatics that it studied in contemporary economics. The concept of pricing includes monetary value and exchange values in general, as well as weights and measures and measuring and valuation tools.

Endowments: this includes the economic functions of endowments, as well as their tools, effects, and the primarily economic ideas related to them – which explains why this category doesn’t extend to the notion and applied models of endowments.

Values and interdependence: this includes ethical aspects and the system of values and interdependence, its components, and tools in the economy.

The study of each book is divided into two parts:

First: general context.

Second: economic ideas.

The first section (the general context) includes the author’s biography, scientific value and methodology, and the economic conditions of the surrounding environment. It also traces the relationship between the ideas discussed in the book and these environmental conditions, as well as the impact that each has on the other. It attempts to understand the author’s identity as a specialist in economic thought, following the development of ideas within the particular temporal and spatial context, confirming or negating the role of reason or thought in the economic structure in Islam as circumstances change.

This section also focuses on the historical context of the book, its economic classification, its overall vision, and the reason for it authorship and title – if any.

As for the second section (economic ideas), which is supposed to take up no less than two-thirds of the study, it includes an explanation and analysis of the most important ideas discussed the book, its strengths and weaknesses, and its link to modern scientific understanding, all while presenting an approximation to contemporary terminology to better understand the author’s intention, the different links between the described concepts and what they are based on. This is all supported by the most important citations included in the book to substantiate the ideas and make sound deductions.

The project takes into account the distinction between Sharia rulings, scientific facts, and the personal opinions of the author, making sure not to burden the author with things he did not say.

To conclude each study is a bibliographical list of what has been written about the author in the field of economic thought.

• Methodological tools:

The studies conducted for the glossary relied on a contextual approach, whereby they study the temporal and spatial relationships that constitute the context of the relative texts and ideas – the context of the situation and the context of the civilization.

The importance of this approach is to be familiarized with the social data that contributed to the writing of the book. These are all clarified in terms of impact, not only at the level of main and sub-ideas of the book, but also at the terminological level. Understanding the civilizational context and that of the situation makes it possible to determine the intended meaning behind words and expressions. The absence of this understanding is what would cause scientific schizophrenia and gaps between reality and theorizing: when a word is used in a specific temporal and spatial context that is different from the one in which it initially emerged. At the same time, the association of words to a particular civilization is one of the most prominent indicators by which one can measure ethnic, religious, or political affiliation.

The studies also relied on an analytical approach, in order to identify the nature, function, and content of the presented economic ideas. This is done by dividing and fragmenting these ideas to facilitate their study and to better evaluate the problems they address or mention. The causes and problems are also identified, allowing to elucidate the reasons that led to the emergence thereof. They are explained in depth by answering the (why’s) and (how’s) of each problem, and this completes the contextual approach.

The project first attempted to identify the environment of economic sciences in which the book in question could be studied so as to best determine its direction, and to overcome some terminological issues in the handling of economic and political literature, such as the confusion between political and economic ideas. This is due to the fact that Sharia policy, as one of the Islamic sciences, did not have this kind of clear delineation of themes. Economic ideas were included in various scientific domains, including Sharia policies.

These problems appear in the use of political expressions when presenting economic or essentially political ideas that barely have anything to do with economics. The project attempts to focus on purely economic ideas, or on ideas that are clearly related to economics, presenting jurisprudential, legal, political, and social rulings, rhetoric, and theories that are inherently related to conflict, governance, society, and urbanization – but only if they carry economic dimensions. It focuses on these dimensions, influences, and impacts in terms of resources, development, work, the market, and so on, while attenuating the intensity of the jurisprudential, legal, and political language, breaking it down to relay it in more economic terms. Whatever is not related to economics is simply referred to as one of the topics the book addresses, as one of the overall ideas, but it is completely ignored in the process of investigating the economic aspects of the book. The project makes sure that the main headings of the presented economic and subsidiary ideas are clear and unambiguous.

In the same vein, the project generally tries to focus on the clear economic ideas included in the heritage books in question, excluding everything that is unclear and being cautious not to use words, terms, and expressions that have historical ties that have not been studied. These especially include the terms related to temporal and spatial contexts from which they cannot be separated.

The project’s keenness to focus on contemporary economic terms – those related to taxes, tax and banking policies, national income, financial budgets, etc. – is to unpack these terms and separate them from their accompanying traditional sayings and jurisprudential rulings, thus narrowing the scope of contemporary uses of these terms to be able to fully analyze traditional ideas. It makes sure to slow readers down and prevent them from lumping these economic ideas with rulings or the Islamic experience in general by using descriptive filler terms such as “what could be considered,” “as formulated by contemporary theories,” and “what could be called…” to maintain the distances between rulings, experience, and terms and concepts. This also aims to avoid scientifically centering the West and being too heavily influenced by the Western cognitive model and its implications, thus releasing researchers’ work from being limited to merely transplanting Western terms and concepts to traditional models, as this would just represent a regurgitation of contexts and the arbitrariness of parachuting theories onto a reality that does not accommodate them – thus giving historical experiences incompatible dimensions.

In addition, the project makes sure to make use of as many readings as possible about the heritage books in question, to ensure the widest possible analysis and the presentation of accurate conclusions and deductions and to build on these. For this purpose, the project also includes a concluding bibliography of these readings and others that could not be referenced in the analysis and presentation – be they Arab or foreign, books, studies, research, research papers presented in conferences, or articles.

Among the problems that the project faced and tried to overcome was the fragmentation of values, ethics, and rulings even in a single book, in the sense that they cannot be organized under one specific economic theme; the project attempts to collect, categorize, and approximate them into a set of specific economic ideas, each of which constitutes a complete philosophical unit. It also attempts to accurately define as many jurisprudential terms and expressions as possible, approximating them to contemporary understandings of such terms.

The project was prepared by a large number of researchers with legal knowledge who are specialized in various branches of economic and financial research.