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Our purpose in this paper is three‐fold. First, we shall briefly describe what is almost a truism— that is, the classical (especially the Greek) intellectual heritage of the Arab‐Islamic scholars upon which the latter, imbued by their young faith, developed their own comprehensive synthesis. Second, as part of that synthesis, we shall explore briefly the economic thought of a few early‐medieval Arab‐Islamic scholastics who extended that heritage and wrote on numerous issues of human concern, including economics. Those discourses took place during what is sometimes called the “golden age” of Islam — a period that coincided roughly with the so‐called Dark Age of Europe. Parenthetically, it might be noted that one of 20th century's most prominent economists, the late Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) had, unfortunately for the continuity and evolution of human intellectual tradition, declared that period as “the Great Gap,” representing “blank centuries,” during which nothing of significance to economics, or for that matter to any field, was said or written anywhere — as though there was a complete lacuna over intellectual evolution throughout the rest of the world (Schumpeter, 52, 74; see Ghazanfar, 1991). And finally, we will provide some evidence as to the historically influential linkages of the Arab‐Islamic thought, including economic thought, with the Latin‐European scholastics‐a phenomenon that facilitated the European intellectual evolution. An underlying theme of this paper is predicated on the premise that the classical tradition (i.e., Greek knowledge, though not exclusively) is part of a long historical continuum that represents the inextricably linked Judeo‐Christian‐and‐Islamic tradition of the West. This theme, though not common appreciated, is amply corroborated through the writings of well‐known scholars from the East and the West (see, for example, Durant, Haskins, Myers, O'Leary, Said, Sarton, Sharif, and others).

This book is important for demonstrating a significant lacuna in our current view of the history of economic thought. It reflects many years of research, and of struggle with established views, on the part of the editor and principal author, S. M. Ghazanfar, who is to be congratulated for having thus carried his program to fruition. He has been ably aided by A. A. Islahi and Hamid Hosseini in this venture. I am reminded of the introduction to Maria Rosa Menocal's (1987) book on The Arabic role in medieval literary history where she poses the question of “courtly love” and thus, indirectly, of chivalry, for Medieval Europe. What is the origin of the troubadour, the bearer of songs of courtly love? A simple solution presents itself in the Arab word “tarab,” or song, from which troubadour seems to follow naturally. Nonetheless, the suggestion was dismissed out of hand because troubadour “could not” have arisen from a society which oppresses women! We should be more concerned with the facts than with our preconceptions about societies.

In the Islamic system, the activity and the performance of all the economic, social, political and religious agents are under the guidance of knowledge given by Allah (SWT). There are some established principles related to the human behavior which are valid in each and every aspect of the universal set of Islamic system and thus valid for all the economic markets, such as labor, goods and money markets. This paper discussed the labor market in the periphery of Tawhidi methodology. The concept of labor in Islam emanates from a concept of intrinsic value as the real worth of a produced thing as well as factor of production. The authors have taken the Quranic precept that says Allah has put fitra in all things during creation and this assumes the primordial value of being in cognitive forms. Hence, if a good is discovered, produced and labor is expended in its production and transaction, there is always that primordial intrinsic value that has in the first place made all the subsequent processes possible. This primordial value must always be discounted from the price of factors and goods as it cannot be claimed. That is why, the Quran says that Allah has created the universe in the midst of plenty, not scarcity. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Literature survey approach was applied in this paper.

The input of fitra is like a value variable (imponderable) linked with two stages of knowledge production – intrinsic knowledge that is innate in exchangeable knowledge flows that are evolved by interactions, say among cooperating agents of the markets and between agents and the observation of variables trends (empiricism). Market exchange is of the classical nature but with this value element in the process of exchange describing not steady-state equilibrium point but evolutionary equilibrium as a result of the knowledge caused and regenerated by interactions, thus affecting the demand and supply schedules through the inhering process of interactions among participants (cooperative ones). The authors can draw an evolutionary form of moving cobweb equilibria that are simply expectational in nature; they are not static except for the very instantaneous case of non-learning.

This is the first attempt. There is a need to conduct more research in this topic.

This paper has practical implication for the policy makers in the environment of moral and ethical economy.

This is an original contribution and is a first attempt in this area.

Watermarking technique is one of the significant methods in which carrier signal hides digital information in the form of watermark to prevent the authenticity of the stakeholders by manipulating different coefficients as watermark in time and frequency domain to sustain trade-off in performance parameters. One challenging component among others is to maintain the robustness, to limit perceptibility with embedding information. Transform domain is more popular to achieve the required results in color image watermarking. Variants of complex Hadamard transform (CHT) have been applied for gray image watermarking, and it has been proved that it has better performance than other orthogonal transforms. This paper is aimed at analyzing the performance of spatio-chromatic complex Hadamard transform (Sp-CHT) that is proposed as an application of color image watermarking in sequency domain (SD).

In this paper, color image watermarking technique is designed and implemented in SD using spatio-chromatic – conjugate symmetric sequency – ordered CHT. The color of a pixel is represented as complex number a*+jb*, where a* and b* are chromatic components of International Commission on Illumination (CIE) La*b* color space. The embedded watermark is almost transparent to human eye although robust against common signal processing attacks.

Based on the results, bit error rate (BER) and peak signal to noise ratio are measured and discussed in comparison of CIE La*b* and hue, saturation and value color model with spatio-chromatic discrete Fourier transform (Sp-DFT), and results are also analyzed with other discrete orthogonal transforms. It is observed from BER that Sp-CHT has 8%–12% better performance than Sp-DFT. Structural similarity index has been measured at different watermark strength and it is observed that presented transform performs better than other transforms.

This work presents the details and comparative analysis of two orthogonal transforms as color image watermarking application using MATLAB software. A finding from this study demonstrates that the Complex Hadamard transform is the competent candidate that can be replaced with DFT in many signal processing applications.

This paper tests the theory that local option sales taxes (LOST) work to the disadvantage of poorer localities, particularly rural areas, where many residents commute to shop and work. We also hypothesize that LOST systems hurt struggling communities more than they help prospering ones. The LOST system is examined using multiple years of data from North Carolina, a state whose tax structure favors such an analysis. The results indicate that LOST systems exacerbate inequality between local communities by actively moving revenue from poorer communities to more wealthy ones. We find evidence that LOST systems cost poorer counties a greater percentage of their total budgets than is gained by the wealthy counties that attract retail activity.

This paper aims to review 69 studies related to Muslim consumer behavior and determine the relationship between these topics and Islamic rationality. In addition, this paper elaborates on Al-Ghazali’s Islamic rationality model.

A text analytics approach is used to map 69 studies on Muslim consumer behavior. In addition, the historical-critical and inductive approach is used to identify Muslim scholars’ concepts and opinions regarding Islamic rationality, especially Al-Ghazali.

This study confirms that Muslim consumer behavior is in line with the concept of Islamic rationality proposed by Al-Ghazali. This is evidenced by a strong awareness of Islamic morals and values, which fosters a high commitment to halal products.

The findings of this study will provide essential benefits in the development of Islamic rationality theory, which can then be used as an alternative in explaining Muslim consumer behavior and also can be used as a reference for stakeholders in the industry to mainstream halalfication on products offered in the Muslim market.

The value of originality in this study lies in identifying the relation between Islamic rationality and Muslim consumer behavior, and this effort was confirmed through 69 selected studies related to Muslim consumer behavior.

This paper examines if country level corruption affects the size of a country’s stock market and its ability to raise equity capital. Using Transparency International’s ranking of countries based on corruption levels, we relate the corruption index to total market capitalization for a sample of 104 countries and also examine the number and volume of new equity issues in each country across time. Additionally, we examine if corruption affects the frequency of foreign firms’ raising capital in the U.S. We find that the corruption index is not highly correlated to either the number of issues or the total volume of issue. The correlation between the average volume of issue and the TI index suggests that there is no clear cut relation between the corruption index and the likelihood of the firm raising capital abroad.

This paper takes a critical look on the received paradigm and points out that its fundamental problems are methodological in nature. The epistemological basis of inductivism and the reductionist agenda underlying the psychologistic individualism which form the core of the neoclassical methodology, for instance, do not lend themselves to the achievement of ethical endogeneity. It then presents an ethico‐economic paradigm based on the Islamic principles and argues that such a paradigm not only offers an alternate characterization of the learning process and a richer preference structure but also ensures its ethical endogeneity.

Using Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), this paper establishes a statistically significant link between CPI and foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to 54 developing and developed countries. In addition to each country’s CPI, several location and economic characteristics are also postulated to influence FDI. For a group of 22 developing countries, the paper then simulates the impact of an improvement in the CPI score on FDI. This simulation shows that a one point improvement in CPI would generate on average additional FDI of 0.5% of GDP. For instance, the gain in annual FDI would be $7.5 billion for India and $18 billion for China. The paper further simulates the effects of larger FDI on the generation of taxable income and tax revenues in each country using country-specific rates of return on US investment and the highest marginal corporate tax rate in each country. This simulation shows that a three point improvement in CPI would more than double the corporate tax take on average with the biggest beneficiaries such as India, Turkey, Egypt, South Korea, the Philippines and Thailand.

The purpose of this research is to present an Islamic monetary theory of value by analyzing real prices and real money in terms of gold and silver in Egypt from 696 to 1517, a period of 821 years from the Umayyads to the Abbasids.

This paper adopts a quantitative empirical investigation derived from a full population of secondary data to deductively evaluate the measure and store of value functions of money, to affirm an Islamic monetary theory of value, which is also inductively researched through a qualitative interpretation of documentary and content analysis of Islamic and numismatic literature.

The Islamic monetary theory of value leads to an Islamic equation of exchange that reconfirms the outcome of this research, where a high value of money ensures low constant real prices over the long term.

The findings are based on an empirical investigation involving a single price of wheat series as a reasonable proxy for changes in wholesale commodity prices generally, which was successfully adopted by other studies.

The significance for modern monetary policy is that monetary authorities should adopt an Islamic monetary theory of value to achieve genuine monetary and price stability.

Through an Islamic equation of exchange, price stability would ensure real economic growth that protects wealth for holders of money due to a stable purchasing power, and combined with Islamic equity finance, more efficiency in allocating investible resources to increase gross domestic product and employment.

The Islamic monetary theory of value ensures that there is no transfer or confiscation of wealth through inflation, which would impart gains to the issuer due to the excessive supply of money in relation to demand.