Islamic Economics and Finance: An Institutional Perspective

After a millennium of atrophy, Muslims have begun a critical reexamination of Islamic thought in all its dimensions in light of the present state of the world. Arguably the first discipline that began this process during the early decades of last century was political philosophy. Reexamination of economics started much later in the second half of the twentieth century and has continued uninterrupted to the present. There is an ongoing constructive debate among scholars on the fundamental question of whether there is a discipline that can be defined unambiguously as Islamic Economics and if so what are its distinguishing characteristics? This presentation is a modest contribution to that debate. It seems reasonable to suggest that any label or prefix that is attached to an economic discipline must bear concrete relationships with economic system that the discipline serves. Thus, disciplines such as socialist economics, capitalist economics, Buddhist economics, Christian economics, Jewish economics, Gandhian economics and others, relate to an envisioned system defined by its characteristics.