One can find a large body of literature on ‘Islamic economics’, in Arabic as well as in English. But many of the works tend to dabble in generalities and to err in a lack of rigour which prevents the emergence of a serious and systematic literature. The recent ‘fad’ of ‘Islamic economics’ has impressed the production with an urgency that has kept the literature produced so far to a superficial and repetitive standard.

More serious undertakings have exploited the formidable legacy of Ibn Khaldun. Thus an Egyptian scholar writing an Encyclopaedia of Islamic Economics would dwell heavily on the Muqaddima. His effort is not unique, nor is it new. The legal tradition had early in the century exploited the famous historian in no less important a scholar than Subhi al-Mahmasani, who wrote his thesis in the 1920s on The Economic Ideas of Ibn Khaldun.

The reliance on Ibn Khaldun is the sign of the apparent dearth of material from which to draw an Islamic theory of economics. In contrast to the riches of constitutional law, economics appears as a non-subject in the faqih tradition: there is simply no general theory of economics, let alone a basis for such theory in a specialised subject like banking.

This is why the works of Muhammad Baqer as-Sadr in economics and banking are significant. Against a classical background where the discipline of economics did not exist, and an Islamic world which by 1960 had produced no consistent reflection in the field, Sadr wrote two serious and lengthy works on the subject, Iqtisaduna and al-Bank al-la Ribawi fil-Islam.