ISLAMIC ECONOMICS AND FINANCE, THEN AND NOW: A FIQHĪ-CONOMIC PERSPECTIVE ON ITS DOCTRINES AND DEBATES*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Each economy functions within a particular social framework, defined by its moral philosophy and legal system. What makes an economy Islamic is Shari'ah, the moral/legal discourses of the classical fuqaha, which defined the economy of classical Islam, shaped its micro and macro institutions, and modulated its actual performance. This economy, which was virtually effaced during the age of European colonialism, has become, in the post-colonial era, both a symbol and basis for revivalist movements in their attempts to re-Islamicize their economies and polities. Taking the economy of classical Islam and its fiqhi-conomic foundations as a point of departure and reference, this study generally aims at overviewing the salient features of the modern Islamic economy, its performance criteria and theoretical justification as envisioned in Islamic Economics, viewed as a science. In particular, it critically narrates the mainlines of the ongoing debate among Muslim scholars, and juxtaposes three main doctrinal approaches advanced by Muslim economists, viewed from the vantage point of efficiency and justice, the sine qua nonof that economy: namely, those of what I nominatively categorize as Reformist Traditionalists (Neo-Taqlidis), Islamic Modernists/Rationalists (Neo-Kalamis), and Neo-Conservative Muslim Secularists. In Section 1, I present a portrait of what I have called the fiqhi-economy of classical Islam: its philosophy of social harmony and related moral doctrine of economic justice as fairness ('adl qua qist), as well as its micro- and macro-economic institutions, and their underlying economic doctrine of socially embedded markets (suqs) a la Polanyi (1957). It serves as a backdrop for dialogically representing the modern (especially the post-colonial) debate on Islamic Economics, and Islamic finance, in the following sections: In section 2, the two polar disputational groups, the Reformist Traditionalists vs. the Muslim Secularists; in section 3, the Islamic Modernists; and in 4 the study concludes by delineating some fundamental commonalities and differences in their respective doctrinal positions. In general, the approach I follow is historicist and comparative-institutionalist; and the mainline argument follows the time-honored classical method of induction by example a laAristotle. As such, the study and its conclusions are bounded by the limitations of this methodology. JEL classification: B4, K00, N20, P5 Key words: Islamic economics, Islamic finance, Fiqhi-Conomic method
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".