What is Islamic economics?
Abstract
The present chapter tries to understand the nature of Islamic economics as defined by Muslim economists. The movement to develop Islamic economics as a social science parallel to conventional economics raised several questions in the minds of Muslim economists. Some of these questions were as follows: _ What exactly is meant by Islamic economics? _ What are the scope and objective of Islamic economics? _ How does it differ from conventional economics? _ Do we need to discard conventional economics? _ Should we create a discipline parallel to conventional economics? _ Should we teach conventional economics and present 'Islamic' criticism or an 'Islamic perspective' on it? _ Should we teach conventional economics but add Islamic economic teachings to widen the horizon of Muslim students of economics? _ Who are the audience of Islamic economics? Are they Muslims only or non-Muslims as well? In the following discussion we shall take up these questions and see how Muslim economists have tackled them.