About fifty years ago some Muslim economists started to write on what they claimed to be Islamic economics. These writers were predominantly of Indian, Pakistani or Egyptian origin, and many of the early works were religiously or politically motivated. They were meant to support popular Islamic political movements such as Jamate-Islami in Pakistan, the Deoband and Aligarh Islamic movements in India and Ikhwan al-Muslimun in Egypt. We thus find works by Maulana Maududi (leader of Jamat in Pakistan), Khurshid Ahmad (a translater of the works of Maududi), Nejatullah Siddiqi (of Aligarh in India), and Hasan al-Bannah and Syed Qutb (of Ikhwan in Egypt) on a whole range of Islamic economic and social consciousness.¹ All these writings stemmed from a religious fervour to awaken Muslims to a new way of thinking about the management of their own destinies in accordance with the tenets of the Qur"an and the traditions of Prophet Muhammad (Sunnah), which together comprise the foundation of Islamic Law, Shari"ah.