Modern Islamic economics is the result of a series of processes that were set in motion by the colonization of the MENA societies, South and Southeast Asia, especially the creation of the modern nation state, the substitution of Islamic law by Western-inspired laws and codes, and by subsequent calls of Muslim reformers and ideologues in the first half of the 20th century (such as Sayyid ‘Ala Mawdudi and Seyyed Qutb) to create an Islamic state and society. While Muslim reformers did not invoke the term “Islamic economics”, they instead discussed various socioeconomic predicaments in the context of colonial policies and Islamic theology. The very term Islamic economics or al-Iqtiṣād al-Islāmī, however, was coined in the subsequent decades by South Asian economists and popularized by Sayyid ‘Ala Mawdudi in his famous Economic Problem of Man and its Islamic Solutions (1947). By building upon the revivalists’ legacy and existing epistemological and methodological frameworks, modern Muslim economists, such as Seyyed Naqvi, Alam Choudhury, and Muhammad Akram, defined the field of Islamic economics and finance either as a third-way economic system or as part of social sciences. By analyzing the concept of iqtiṣād, its genealogy, and its different epistemological value from the modern term “economics,” in this paper I try to provide an answer to the questions “how did modern Islamic economics develop as a discipline and what forces contributed to its naissance”. I argue that modern Islamic economics treats economic activities not as moral endeavors and part of the overall Sharī‘a’s moral law, as indicated in numerous classical works (e.g. al-Shaybani, Ibn Abi Al Dunya, al-Muhasibi, al-Ghazali, etc.), but primarily as legal-technical engagements entrenched in the modern division of knowledge. In order to reexamine the scope and meaning of the concept of iqtiṣād, in this paper I question the genealogy of modern Islamic economics and its disciplinary developments, as well its amalgamation into the global economic system. By resorting to primary sources in Arabic and secondary literature, I propose approaching economic thought in Islamic tradition and the very concept of iqtiṣād from a polyvalent and interdisciplinary perspectives, which – unlike neoliberal economics – treat economic activities as part of a cosmological constellation, and as such, a response born out of the decolonial struggle in order to achieve higher ends.