ABSTRACT
In his classic History of Economic Analysis (1954), Joseph A.Schumpeter proposed that economic analysis begins only with the Greeks and was not reestablished until the rise of European scholasticism in the hands of St Thomas Aquinas (1225-74). This “Great Gap” in economic thought, then, coincides with the Islamic golden age, when various Muslim writers made substantial contributions in various fields of inquiry, including economic matters. The Schumpeterian “Great Gap” thesis has been deeply entrenched as part of the accepted tradition in economics and is reflected in almost all relevant literature in our discipline (Mirakhor 1988; Ghazanfar 1991, 117-18). As a result of this thesis, whose prevalence in economics literature dates long before 1954, Western historians of economic thought have ignored the contributions of medieval Islamic scholars, or at least have reduced them to footnotes (Hosseini 1995). It is no wonder that Islamic contributions to the history of economic thought are ignored in Eric Roll’s A History of Economic Thought (1953), Henry W.Spiegel’s The Growth of Economic Thought (1983), Ingrid Rima’s Development of Economic Analysis (1991), Barry Gordon’s Economic Analysis Before Adam Smith (1975), Robert Lekachman’s A History of Economic Ideas (1959), Jacob Oser and W.C.Blanchfield’s Evolution of Economic Thought
(1975), and Harry Landreth and David C.Colander’s History of Economic Theory (1989). These writers, “usually quick to find a deceased precursor for every theorist”, have remained silent about the contributions of medieval Muslim writers.
