economic thought of an arab schlastic : hamid al-ghazali

this paper explores the economic thought of abu hamid al-ghazali an eleventh century arab scholar 'acclaimed as the great-est ... certainly one of the greatest ' watt . vii . and by general com sent the most important of the thinker of medieval islam (bagley his)writings as those of european scholastics and others of this era empha - sized the holistic intellectual approach . while there have been other studies on his knowledge none has investigated his contributions to eco nomics espocially on the basis of a detailed scrutiny of his that void there are also others secondary concerns about twenty five years ago joseph spengler wrote an excellent artical on the economic thought of another arab scholar ibn khalden (732-808/1332-1404 ) and while referring arab islamic literature of the era . he concluded that the knowledge of economic behavior in some circles was very great indeed and one must turn to the writing of those with access to this knowledage and experience if one would know the actual state of musslim economic knowleadge (1964, 304) that indees is true for it is possible to indentify at least thirty arab scholastics prior to ibn khaldun who wrote exten sively on economic matters , ghazali being one of the most prominent another scholar writing on ibn khaldun called him among the fathers