islamic economic renaissance 401state public policy at the macro level if a state is wishing to Islamise
its economic system.
Nevertheless, more efforts are still needed on the side of “redis-
covering” economic concepts and ideas as emanating from the reli-
gion of Islam itself. To put it another way, the identity of Islamic
economics needs to be extracted and highlighted further from Islamic
sources: the Qur"àn and Sunnah, and the jurisprudence of the early
caliphs and Sharì"ah jurists. Wilson for example wonders why even
in a work related to price control in a recent writing on Islamic eco-
nomics there is no mention of al-Γsbah in Islam (Wilson, 1998).
Sardar is taking this issue seriously in his “Islamic Futures: the Shape
of Ideas to Come”, when he discusses various issues among which
are: rediscovering the epistemology of Islam, the Sharì"ah as a prob-
lem solving methodology, Islamic economics from partial to axiomatic
approach, Islamic concept of development, and other important issues
(Sardar, 1985). Sardar advocates a freedom of inquiry approach to
an Islamic search for answers and ideas, that is free from imitation
and that is guided by the Qur"àn and Sunnah (ibid.). One would
emphasize with Sardar the need to look into economic issues with
an Islamic fresh pair of eyes. This is not to say that what has been
written on economic issues in the Western literature should be dis-
carded by Islamic economists in their pursuit of fresh Islamic eco-
nomics concepts, that would be a great loss of a considerable amount
of knowledge, but it is to stress that Muslim economists in search-
ing for Islamic economics identity may need to look at Islamic eco-
nomics as a “born new” science that does not have to be necessarily
pegged to concepts from the Western economic literature. For exam-
ple, if Islamic economics is capable by itself to produce its own orig-
inal concepts and ideas there may not be a need for the often
mentioned statement that the economic treatment is “from an Islamic
perspective”; a phrase and a statement that seems to be popular among
writers in the late twentieth century writing on Islamic economics.
One can understand the difficulty of steering away from the inevitable
comparison and the “Islamic perspective” syndrome. After all, most
of Muslim economists who have, so far, been pioneering the writ-
ing in the field are either Western educated or educationally Western
influenced. Hence, the comparison might be inevitable and the
“Islamic perspective” treatment and phrase is unavoidable. The task
might be difficult but not impossible. The importance of this point
is twofold: (a) while imported goods might be highly desirable for a