ABSTRACT
Our purpose in this paper is to explore and present the economic thought of selected early medieval Arab-Islamic Scholastics, with a special focus on their public-sector economics. Our sources for this task are chiefly their Arabiclanguage writings, though not exclusively. While one can identify at least thirty to thirty-five such scholars who wrote on various economic issues, for the sake of brevity we will concentrate on three names: Abu Yousuf (73198), Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali (1058-1111) and Ibn Taimiyah (1263-1328). To be sure, however, while their economic thought tended to be highly normative and was not couched in terms of contemporary analytical rigour, yet one finds considerable positive content in these writings.2
