The Changing Meaning of Just Price: Ibn Taymiyya and the Ottoman Hanafi Tradition

This paper revisits the notion of "just price" within Islamic intellectual thought by comparing the writings of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328) and Ottoman Hanafi jurists. Drawing on recent historiography and underused primary sources, it situates these debates within broader inquiries into the moral and institutional foundations of market exchange, with a comparative glance at Western scholasticism. For Ibn Taymiyya, just price fuses normative and analytical claims: it turns on consent, fairness in exchange, and market structures that shape bargaining power-concerns that resonate with medieval and early modern scholastic reasoning. Ottoman scholars, writing within a more centralized and bureaucratized milieu, reframed the notion in prescriptive and distributive terms, emphasizing profit regulation, provisioning, and social equity over processual fairness and bargaining asymmetries. A diachronic comparison thus reveals a contraction of conceptual scope from Ibn Taymiyya to the Ottomans, in contrast to the broadening trajectory in the Western scholastic tradition. The Ottoman treatment of just price, I argue, reflects less a uniquely "Islamic" economic logic than a historically contingent administrative ethics of market governance.