Economic Cosmologies and Ethics in Islamic Scholarship

This research seminar is convened by Dr. Sami Al-Daghistani (Centre for Theology and Religious Studies, Lund University).

We invite researchers to submit proposals for a seminar exploring the ethical and cosmological foundations of economic thought across Islamic intellectual traditions. The seminar examines how Muslim scholars have understood wealth, ownership, exchange, production, and livelihood within broader conceptions of morality, divine trust, and human flourishing.

Over recent decades, Islamic economics and finance have attracted considerable attention from scholars and practitioners. The field has been variously understood as a “third-way” economic system, part of wider Islamization efforts, and a discipline within the social sciences. These different approaches have generated debates about its scope, methods, and relationship to classical Islamic sources. Despite the growth of scholarship on Islamic economics, the relationship between classical ethical frameworks and modern Islamic economics remains underexplored. This seminar addresses that relationship by asking: What are the ethical-economic principles of classical Islamic thought? What is the nature of ownership? What is the purpose of wealth? How is the human being situated in relation to economic resources and the lived environment? Is the economy primarily a sphere of competition, or one of trust and stewardship?