C H A P T E R T H R E E Contributions of Medieval Muslim Scholars to the History of Economics and their Impact: A Refutation of the Schumpeterian 1 Great Gap No historical student of the culture of Western Europe can ever reconstruct for himself the intellectual values of the later Middle Ages unless he possesses a vivid awareness of Islam | CHAPTER THREE Contributions of Medieval Muslim Scholars to the History of Economics and their Impact A Refutation of the Schumpeterian Great Gap1 Hamid S. Hosseini No historical student of the culture of Western Europe can ever reconstruct for himself the intellectual values of the later Middle Ages unless he possesses a vivid awareness of Islam in the background. Pierce Butler 1933 quoted by Mirakhor The Great Gap Thesis as the Problem In his seminal 1954 work History of Economic Analysis Joseph Schumpeter proposes a historical gap of some five hundred years in the history of economics after its beginnings in ancient Greece. Nothing was said written or practiced Contributions of Medieval Muslim Scholars 29 which had any relevance to economics Mirakhor 1988 1983 p. 301 within this historical gap which stretched from the demise of Greek civilization to the writings of Thomas Aquinas 1225-74 . For according to Schumpeter 1954 p. 74 many centuries within that span are blanks. Emphasizing the contributions of Thomas Aquinas which to Schumpeter were instrumental in ending that five hundred years of historical discontinuity the author of History of Economic Analysis writes so far as our subject is concerned we may leap over 500 years to the epoch of St. Thomas Aquinas 1225-74 whose Summa Theologica is in the history of thought what the South-Western spire of the Cathedral of Chartres is in the history of architecture Schumpeter p. 74 . According to Schumpeter what distinguished the thirteenth century from the twelfth eleventh and earlier centuries was the revolution that took place due to Aquinas and the Scholastics in theological and philosophical thought. This revolution Schumpeter maintains had two causes the rediscovery of Aristotle s writings and what he calls the towering achievements of St. Thomas Aquinas Schumpeter p. 87 . De-emphasizing the first cause Schumpeter writes that The reader will observe that I do not assign to the recovery of Aristotle s .
