ABSTRACT
Our purpose in this paper is threefold. First, we shall briefly document what is almost a truism-that is, the classical (especially the Greek) intellectual heritage of the Arab-Islamic scholars upon which the latter, imbued by their young faith, developed their own comprehensive synthesis. Second, as part of that synthesis, we shall explore briefly the economic thought of a few early medieval Arab-Islamic Scholastics who extended that heritage and wrote on numerous issues of human concern, including economics. Those discourses took place during what is sometimes called the “Golden Age” of Islam-a period that coincided roughly with the so-called Dark Ages of Europe. Parenthetically, it might be noted that one of the twentieth century’s most prominent economists, the late Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), had, unfortunately for the continuity and evolution of human intellectual tradition, declared that period as the “Great Gap”, representing “blank centuries”, during which nothing of significance to economics, or for that matter to any field, was said or written anywhere-as though there was a complete lacuna over intellectual evolution throughout the rest of the world (Schumpeter 1954, 52, 74; see Ghazanfar 1991). And finally, we will provide some evidence as to the historically influential linkages between ArabIslamic thought, including economic thought, with the Latin-European Scholastics-a phenomenon that facilitated European intellectual evolution. An underlying theme of this paper is predicated on the premise that the classical tradition (i.e. Greek knowledge, though not exclusively) is part of a long historical continuum that represents the inextricably linked JudeoChristian and Islamic tradition of the West. This theme, though not commonly appreciated, is amply corroborated through the writings of wellknown scholars from the East and the West (see, for example, Durant; Haskins; Myers; O’Leary; Said; Sarton; Sharif; and others).
