Based on his two recent books, Ethical Teachings of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali and The Making of Islamic Economic Thought, in this presentation, Sami Al-Daghistani analyzes the development and conceptual framework of economic thought in the Islamic tradition pertaining to ethical, legal, and philosophical ideas. While initially conceived as a “third-way economic system,” the progenitors of modern Islamic economics have often been structurally and epistemically dependent on key conceptualizations in conventional economics and its worldview. Concomitantly, the pre-modern scholarship nurtured complex attitudes toward economic life associated with the ethical self in that various legal scholars, theologians, and Sufis addressed earning a living and other economic postulates in the context of Sharī‘a law. He argues that classical Muslim scholars maintained a polyvalent understanding of economic thought as a human science based on virtuous traits of character and self-examination, embedded in a particular cosmology of human relationality, metaphysical intelligibility, and economic subjectivity.