Rethinking Islamic Finance
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Rethinking Islamic Finance
Islamic finance’s phenomenal growth owes to the Shariah compliant nature of its financial instruments. Shariah forbids the charging of interest (Riba) and instead promulgates risk-sharing and trade-based modes of financing. The Islamic financial industry has been subject to both critique and admiration. Critics argue that Islamic instruments (bearing debt-based structures) differ from their conventional counterparts only in legal lexicon and not in economic impact. The admirers argue that such instruments, irrespective of wider economic implications, rigorously comply with ‘juristically sound’ Islamic principles. This book aims to reconcile the above dispute. It argues that the financial impact of instruments is a consequence of the way they are priced and structured. The similarity in pricing and structures is an outcome not of the underlying Islamic financial modes but of the competitive environment in which Islamic instruments compete. Even risk-sharing and trade-based Islamic structures, if implemented in such an environment, would have a financial impact similar to that of conventional instruments. This book has a wider appeal for both academic and non-academic audiences. It can complement undergraduate and graduate courses as an additional reading on the intricacies of Islamic financial instruments and markets. For PhD students, it would help identify future research areas. To non-academics, it offers a deeper understanding regarding the working of the Islamic finance industry.
Rethinking Money
Though Islamic economics, often used synonymously with Islamic finance, possesses an extensive general bibliography, very little has been written about its historical development as an idea in the Arab world. Still less has addressed the relationship of Islamic economics to decolonization. Through a series of snapshots of specific historical junctures and special focus on the representative writings of Shiite cleric Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr, this dissertation traces the formative years of Islamic economics in the Arab world. Two primary questions drive the analysis in this project: First, why and how was Islamic economics conceived as a form of spiritual and material decolonization? Second, why did Islamic economics eventually come to be defined narrowly as a form of banking primarily derived from Western conventional models? An examination of Western conventional banking’s nineteenth century eclipse of previous Ottoman economic structures, followed by an analysis of the religious political economy driving the rise of Islamic finance as an idea in the early twentieth century, serve to introduce the origins of Islamic economics as an idea with enduring resonance, explaining its salience, urgency, and popular appeal. Then, the dissertation introduces the major relevant works of al-Sadr, Falsafatunā (Our Philosophy, 1959), Iqtiṣādunā (Our Economics, 1961) and its important second edition preface (1968), and Al-Bank al-lā-Ribawī (The Usury-Free Bank, 1969), analyzing them as canonical texts in the theorization and development of Islamic economics in practice, with specific reference to the surrounding moment of Arab decolonization in which they were written. Islamic economics, as idea and as phenomenon, is ultimately a form of identity assertion and religious reclamation as much as economic practice. As a form of banking, it served a further decolonizing goal: as a means to compete successfully in the global arena with its Western conventional counterpart. As such, Islamic economics is an example of decolonization in both the spiritual and material realms.
Islamic Banking
The prohibition of interest is the feature of Islamic banking which most distinctly sets it apart from conventional banking. To Western eyes, this seems a strange restriction, but Christian countries themselves maintained such a ban for 1,400 years. Islamic Bankingasks why Islam has been able to maintain its stand. The book explores the intricacies of Islamic law and the religious and ethical principles underpinning Islamic banking. It then considers the analytical basis of Islamic banking and financing in the light of modern theories of financial intermediation, and identifies the conceptual issues to be overcome. Following case studies of the operations of Islamic banks in Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Malaysia and Australia, along with Iran, Pakistan and Sudan, the volume concludes that many of the criticisms of their activities seem misplaced. It argues that the factors governing success are the distinctive system of corporate governance and continued product innovation. The book ends by considering four such innovations - Islamic investment banking and project finance, Islamic insurance, Islamic securities and the formation of a pan-Islamic international financial centre. This pathbreaking volume - the first to consider Islamic banking and finance from a global perspective - will be of great interest to scholars of money and banking, international finance and Middle Eastern studies.