Ibn Taimiyah's concept of market mechanism

The concepts of demand and supply are most fundamental in the science of economics. They are the essence of market mechanism. But the idea of classifying all market forces into these two broad categories and of price determination through demand and supply was a very late development in the history of economic thought. The present paper presents Ibn Taimiyah's (d.1328) concept of market mechanism. He had a clear notion of the prices in a free market being determined by the forces we now call demand and supply and the factors that affect them. The paper also compares his ideas on the topic with those of other writes until mid-eighteenth century