islamic economic renaissance 355general, and Islamic economics in particular, there had been in the
Islamic world dedicated Muslim publishers who carried the task of
publishing papers and researches, motivated mainly by the religious
drive; not ignoring however whatever gain that may bring with it.
Dar-al-Fikre al-Arabi, House of Arabic Thought (Cairo), al-Dar al-
Arabiyah, Arabic House, (Cairo), Dar al-Nahdah al-Arabiyah, Arabic
Renaissance House, (Cairo), Dar al-Kitab al-Lubnani, the Lebanese
Book House, (Beirut) and Sh Muœammad Ashraf (Lahore), are some
examples of the many publishing houses that helped promote the
writing on Islamic economics.
The help of Islamic journals, even with their lack of speciality in
Islamic economics, was also notable and very encouraging. Islamic
Review (London), Islamic Literature (Lahore), Islamic Thought
(Aligarh), Islamic Quarterly (London), Al-Azhar (Cairo), al-Manar
(Cairo), Criterion (Karachi), al-Nadwah (Makkah), Islamic Culture
(Hyderabad), Islamic Studies (Islamabad), Islam and the Modern Age
(New Delhi) and Voice of Islam (Karachi) are examples of these reli-
gious journals that devoted pages and issues to Islamic economics,
among other Islamic studies, and helped the subject develop.
The Topics
The early topics covered were, by implication, of religious-social-
economic nature, but not, by necessity, political. There was a con-
scious intention to avoid any clash with governments, the majority
of which were in favour of secularisation as a way forward to eco-
nomic development. The topics were revolving around social justice
and Islamic social solidarity, two firmly embedded values in Islam.
Zakàh and Ribà, the charge and earning of interest, were a plausi-
ble start and they appeared more than others in the mid twentieth
century writing, as they represent the two basic sacred values in
Islam of justice and solidarity. That remained to be the case at least
up the third quarter of the twentieth century, beyond which the
Islamic economics writing began to spread to topics of a highly tech-
nical nature. Now, the topics are on par with almost all technical
issues in Western economics.
The following topics will be explored below as pioneering and
major examples of writing on Islamic economists in the twentieth
century: