Status and trends of research in Islamic economics : questions, answers and comments

الملخص EN

-Status and trends of research in the field of Islamic economics (IE) is important to all who care for its progress.

The editorial board (EB) of the Journal of King Abdulaziz University: Islamic Economics (JKAU:IE) posed questions in this regard and invited specialists for answers.

The questions focused on IE research methodology, diversity, quality, and areas that still have to be covered.

This paper focuses mainly on three of the EB questions, besides commenting on Asad Zaman’s leading article (Zaman, 2021) presented in response to the invitation of the EB of JKAU:IE.

The first among the selected questions is about the main attributes of good quality research in economics and IE in particular.

Answering this question requires displaying criteria employed in judging quality standards in economics and seeing how far these can be applied in IE, which is of a particular religious and philosophical nature.

The second question is about the availability of well-defined metrics that can provide an objective assessment of the research quality in economics, IE included.

Otherwise, assessment of quality would depend on subjective matters such as experience and value judgments.

And how far each approach would serve healthy progress of research in IE? This question is obviously inseparable from the first one.

Its answer begs a question about IE: could it be classified within sciences that accept well-defined metric assessment or not? IE is a social science that is intensively value-loaded, and evaluation of research quality may need qualitative evaluation in the first place.

As for the third question, it revolves around methodology, whether the new trend of quantitative analysis is more suitable for IE research or the descriptive or qualitative analysis? The answer needs to address the development of research methodology in economics, in general, and IE in particular and the factors that favor or disfavor increasing reliance on the quantitative analysis in comparison to the traditional qualitative method.