I was asked by ISNA to produce a short guide to Islamic Banking and Finance for the Muslims of North America. To keep this guide short, we had to define our target audience rather carefully. This introductory guide is meant to address the Muslim who is familiar with the fundamental tenets and sources of legislation in Islam. The reader is not assumed to have elaborate prior knowledge of Islamic...

A large literature contends that legal systems that adapt efficiently to meet the contracting needs of the economy foster financial sector development. The paper discusses the adaptability features of Islamic law related to commercial transactions (Islamic commercial law) in light of contemporary financial system. After discussing the nature and way the common and civil law traditions can evolv...

Islamic finance has gripped the world with a strong fervor and passion. Interest in this discipline has proliferated to almost 60 countries, going beyond the Islamic world to the leading global financial centers. For quite sometime, United Kingdom has adopted an open door policy and provided a level playing field to Islamic finance and now Singapore is following its lead. Every day, Islamic fin...

There is a serious lack of empirical studies on Islamic banking. This paper attempts to fill that gap to some extent. Using data for the 1990-98 period, several hypotheses and common perceptions about the practice of Islamic banking have been tested. The performance of Islamic banks has been evaluated using both trend and ratio analyses. For this purpose, some objective “benchmarks” for various...

Islamic art is unique because its form and function permeate both distance and time. Since the birth of Islam, Muslim artists around the world have created pieces of art that share an uncanny resemblance to pieces created by other Muslim artists through common themes, appearances, and applications. These similarities include calligraphic elements, exaggerated depictions of plants and animals, a...

This article formulates a model of Islamic science, medicine, and bioethics, part of the ongoing inner-Islamic discourse on the positioning of Islam vis-a-vis the life sciences and bioethics as developed within a non-Islamic context. It investigates the Islam-and-science paradigm considering the Islamic categorization of the sciences, provides a working definition of Islamic science including m...

This study investigates the banking behavior of Islamic bank customers in Bangladesh. By collecting data from a sample of 100 customers of Islamic banks, researchers conducted a comprehensive profile analysis, a number of chi-square tests, and t tests and found a number of key findings as to the behavior of Islamic bank customers in Bangladesh. First, most of the customers of Islamic banks fall...

the study of the interactions among different religions’ related artworks is one of the most important evidences in comparative studies towards attaining new information and insights in the development of these works in different lands and countries. the extant samples of such studies indicate how artistic movements come into being and expand during the evolution of religions in societies and t...

This paper exposes the “roadmap” of how modern Islamist terrorism is financed, through both legitimate and illegitimate means: the networks and linkages between financing obtained on the one hand through sympathetic Islamic governments, Islamic charities and banks, seemingly legitimate businesses operating as fronts, and on the other hand through criminal activities running the full gamut from ...