Thirty years of research in the history of Islamic economic thought:Assessment and future directions

The present paper examines and evaluates research experiences in the area of the history of Islamic economic thought during the last 30 years with the objective to see the pace of research and its coverage, both author-wise and idea-wise, and to determine the future research agenda in the light of the past progress and trends of the literature. The paper begins with a brief survey of the early literature on the history of Islamic economic thought, prior to 30-years, to provide a background. Then it studies and evaluates the research during the last thirty years, 1976-2006. It finds that hitherto the research in the history of Islamic economic thought has been language, region and period specific – Arabic, the Middle East and up to 9th/15th century respectively. More attention has been paid to write on economic thought of few personalities than others. The situation is still worse in case of idea-wise research. However, this literature has exerted some effects on scholars of the main stream economic thought and a few of them are trying to rehabilitate it in the main body of economic thought. At the end, the paper emphasizes on need for intensive and extensive research to include more personalities, ideas, periods, languages and regions and to write a systematic history of the subject.