Challenges in Naming the Discipline: Are there any other Alternatives to "Islamic Economics"?

Abstract

Muslims have been facing many challenges in the last century where economic systems have been of main challenge. Even though not defined precisely in terminology and naming Muslims have always worried for performing economic activities according to Islam. Yet this has been hard to be done after Muslims have lost the governance attached to religion thus opening the way towards colonialism politically, economically, and culturally. As a result, Muslim societies throughout the world were imposed different economic systems that were in contradiction with the spirit of Islam. As a way out, Muslim societies were motivated to make movements towards establishing an economic system that complies with Islam. Being a challenge for establishing another challenge has been proper naming. Concerns related to naming Islamic economy even though debated many times because of different reasons, circumstances, and timeframes have been brought as an issue up to our living days . In this paper, we mainly focus on trying to provide solutions on the proper naming of the Islamic economy. At the same time, we dwell on the journey that this challenge has gone through. Firstly, we have looked at the usage and representativeness of several names such as economy, oiconomia, economics, political economy, and moral economy. Then we have continued debating the use of the name iqtisad over the name economy. Additionally, we have advocated the usage of the prefix Islamic . We briefly glanced at the reasons for the decline in Muslim society. Narratively we have looked at contributors in the field of Islamic economics. We have conducted qualitative research, and mostly we have focused on the analysis of the theoretical framework.