Abstract

Since its formal inception in the early 20th century, Islamic economicshas been considered a modern phenomenon, even though its foundations canbe traced back to the earliest of Muslim civilizations. However, despite Islamiceconomics being more than half a century old, there are many serious issues,such as epistemological and methodological concerns, that need to be resolved.In order to delve into such matters, a clear understanding of the origins of modernIslamic economics is necessary. Hence, some of the important questions are:who are its initiators, what were they especially interested in, and how have itssubject matter, agenda and intentions changed through different time-periods.Accordingly, the aim of this paper is to focus on and evaluate the course ofthe early development of Islamic economics via two bibliographies of Siddiqi, and Zaim. In order to attain this aim, content analysis usingexcel-generated heat maps are used to facilitate contextualized interpretation.More specifically, heat maps for the two selected works mentioned above arecreated from the two bibliographies in order to make comparisons betweenthem.