ABSTRACT
My primary purpose in this article is to identify and present some parallels and similarities between the major economic ideas of two medieval Scholastics: Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111), “acclaimed as the greatest…certainly one of the greatest” (Watt 1963, vii) and “by general consent, the most important thinker of medieval Islam” (Bagley 1964, xv); and St Thomas Aquinas (1225-74), the most prominent of the European-Latin schoolmen, “the Doctor Angelicus, the Princeps Scholasticorum” (Pribram 1983, 4), “perhaps the greatest Catholic philosopher of all time” (Newman et al. 1954, 16). Heretofore, some scholars of medieval history have explored similarities and links between AlGhazali and St Thomas with reference to other dimensions of their discourses, but none has focused on their economic views. While this essay mainly discusses similarities in the economic ideas of the two Scholastics, more serious analysis might further corroborate the observations of historians as to links between the two in other areas of knowledge. Further, it might be noted that while Thomistic economic thought is well recognized in the literature, very little is known about the contributions of AlGhazali-one of several Arab-Islamic precursors of medieval Europe’s Latin Scholastics who wrote extensively on economic issues.2 Much of the economic thought of the Arab-Islamic Scholastics belongs in the several centuries between the Greeks and St Thomas Aquinas-a period unfortunately labelled as the “Great Gap” of “blank centuries” by the late Joseph Schumpeter (see Ghazanfar 1991, 1995).3
