An Analysis of Selected Arabic Terminology in Iqbal’s Book: The Science of Economics

تحليل بعض الـمصطلحات العربية في كتاب علم الاقتصاد لإقبال

Abstract

Allama Muhammad Iqbal’s Science of Economics occupies a distinctive place in his intellectual and scholarly trajectory. This treatise represents his first prose work in Urdu and marks a serious, methodical attempt to introduce modern economic thought into the Urdu language. Understanding the circumstances surrounding its composition therefore requires attention to Iqbal’s educational background, his teaching career, and the broader intellectual climate of the early twentieth century. This study demonstrates that Iqbal’s Urdu prose relies heavily on classical Arabic resources to naturalize modern economic terminology, while carefully adapting syntactic structures to suit the linguistic framework of Urdu. His approach reflects a deliberate concern for semantic precision in the formulation of each term. The research thus provides a scholarly foundation for examining how foreign economic concepts are rendered into Arabic-derived terminology, and it opens the possibility for expanded terminological analysis of individual expressions in future work, supported by precise textual references and documentation.