Yet today
Islamic finance is a trillion-dollar industry with many financial institutions,
corporations and governments keen to embrace it as a profit-making alternative
to mainstream financial dealings.
Harris Irfan
is an insider on two fronts. He is a Muslim and also an expert in finance and
commerce. He has worked as an investment banker in Europe
and the Middle East and been head of Islamic finance at Barclays; he also founded Cordoba Capital, an
Islamic finance advisory firm.
Mr Irfan
is a man with a mission: to show that Islamic finance might be able to make a
real contribution to our economic woes. He asks the reader to consider whether
the Islamic world can "bring something of benefit to the Western world,
and vice versa".
This is
no mean task, but Mr Irfan uses his own professional and personal experiences
to weave together an accessible and interesting story.
We get an
insight into the birth of the Islamic finance system in the fifties, to the
establishment of the first Muslim banks in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States and the gradual
recognition by Western banks of the enormous profit potential in structuring
products on a sharia-compliant basis.
Traditional
clerics were flattered with the attention and remuneration offered by the
giants of the banking industry in exchange for their expertise.
While
this book isn't full of jargon, it helps to know something about how the
investment industry works. You also need to have some sense of Islamic history
and religious concepts. But the religious commentary does not overcomplicate
the narrative. Anecdotes about the life of the eighth-century Muslim legal
scholar Abu Hanifa, the financial workings of the Ottoman Empire and the modern
controversial Pakistani scholar Taqi Usmani all add weight.
The last
chapter ponders the future of Islamic banking after some sharia-compliant
finances were unfairly equated with funding terrorism, Worth reading.
Indo
Business
