A canary in a Coalmine! religious agency and its impact on the performance of Islamic banks

We examine the impact of religious agency on performance GCC Islamic banks. Our results show that a high proportion prominent scholars Shariah supervisory boards (SSB) improves financial performance. However, when scholar chairs SSB there are negative effects. With concentration few scholars, our findings have twofold implications: first, future research should develop approaches to test governance effectiveness in relation assigned mandate SSBs; second, is need for revisiting compliance mechanisms mitigate embeddedness and their influence bank