Abstract

While we can accurately regard modern economics as predominantly a Western social science, and cannot ignore the contributions of ancient Greeks to this science, we should by no means ignore the contributions of non-Western civilizations to this old branch of social thought. This is particularly true of medieval Muslims in general and medieval Persian-speaking (Iranian) scholars in particular. As this chapter will demonstrate, medieval Persian scholars contributed a great deal to the development of economics when few such ideas were being generated in Christian Europe.