This timely book investigates the ideas and concepts that drive and shape Islamic finance. Hans Visser covers recent developments and explores tensions between belief systems and market demands, to consider the future of Islamic finance in the modern marketplace. In this updated third edition, Visser reviews the numerous products, institutions and markets offered by Islamic finance, situating them in the competitive contemporary environment. This incisive book questions the conceptual differences that have been established between Islamic finance and conventional finance, drawing attention instead to how the former imitates the latter. Offering a critical assessment of the claims of the ethical superiority of Islamic finance frequently made by its advocates, Visser further discusses the ways in which fiscal and monetary policy can be adapted to Islamic financial institutions. Concise, yet comprehensive in scope, this book offers new directions for economics and finance students interested in alternatives to conventional finance, as well as students of Islamic finance and Islam studies more broadly. International bankers, financial journalists and politicians will find Visser's succinct exploration of Islamic finance and financial institutions invaluable.

This book covers the recent literature concerning Islamic banking and finance (IBF), focuses on the history of IBF since its inception and introduces the latest innovative concepts and practices in the field. The authors cover important topics such as the role of ownership, Shari`ah compliance and governance structures in raising debt capital using IBF practices, including Fatwa issues and the use of benchmarking practices. The book also addresses topics like archival data, the influence of leverage on ownership structure, and sukuk structures, as well as misconceptions, threats, challenges and opportunities in IBF. Finally, the book deals with prominent issues such as business score-carding, Takaful (Islamic Insurance), IBF implications for block-chain-based fintech and finance hub concepts in Islamic microfinance models. This edited volume is an important contribution to the IBF literature as it provides a much-needed in-depth look into industry practices through the perspective of corporate finance and governance. With its interdisciplinary approach covering legal and financial issues along with a wide variety of notable contributors, this book will be a valuable reference guide to both teachers and students of Islamic banking and economics.

'Lyrical and uncompromising - Suhaiymah writes to disrupt' - gal-dem Islamophobia is everywhere. It is a narrative and history woven so deeply into our everyday lives that we don't even notice it - in our education, how we travel, our healthcare, legal system and at work. Behind the scenes it affects the most vulnerable, at the border and in prisons. Despite this, the conversation about Islamophobia is relegated to microaggressions and slurs. Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan reveals how Islamophobia not only lives under the skin of those who it marks, but is an international political project designed to divide people in the name of security, in order to materially benefit global stakeholders. It can only be truly uprooted when we focus not on what it is but what it does. Tangled in Terror shows that until the most marginalised Muslims are safe, nobody is safe.

Israel is considered a developed country yet both security issues and its frequently changing demographic makeup set Israel apart and imply that Israeli policy analysts must operate in a unique environment and grapple with exceptional challenges. This volume, part of the successful International Library of Policy Analysis series, brings together for the first time a comprehensive study of policy analysis in Israel. Following an introductory chapter that discusses the paradoxical history of policy analysis in Israel by Yehezkel Dror, leading figures from both the Israeli public and academic spheres discuss different aspects of policy analysis in Israel. While Israeli policy analysis is in some respects unique, Israel also represents a broad category of states that could be considered as policy analysis "late developers". Hence, while Israeli policy analysis is fascinating in and of itself, its study also holds important lessons for other countries.

In the southern German city of Stuttgart lives a pious Muslim population that has merged with the local population to create a meaningful shared existence. In this ethnographic account, the author introduces and examines the lives of ordinary residents, neighborhoods, and mosque communities to analyze moments and spaces where Muslims and non-Muslims engage with each other and accommodate their respective needs. These accounts show that even in the face of resentment and discrimination, this pious population has indeed become an integral part of the urban community.

This book explores one of the most topical and controversial issues of recent years -jihadist terrorist infiltration of irregular migrant flows to Europe. Utilizing robust sampling criteria, more than a hundred such cases are identified and rigorously assessed. The analysis reveals the characteristics of offenders, their travel patterns and operational activities, and critically evaluates subsequent law enforcement and judicial responses. The author draws upon interviews with a range of European security officials, as well as non-governmental organization employees, and a recent refugee, in order to provide a series of practical recommendations.

In this social history of African American Muslim polygyny, Debra Majeed sheds light on the struggles of families whose form and function conflict with U.S. civil law. While all forms of polygamy are banned in the United States, polygyny has steadily emerged as an alternative force to the low numbers of marriageable African American men and the high number of female-led households in black America. Majeed situates African American Muslims in the center of this dialogue on polygyny, examining the choices available to women in these relationships and the scope of their rights. She calls attention to the efficacy of marital choice and the ways in which interpretationsof Islam's primary sources are authorized or legitimated to control the rights of Muslim women. Exploring how women share motivations, rationales, and consequences of living in polygynous families, Majeed highlights the legal, emotional, and communal implications while encouraging Muslim communities to develop formal measures that ensure the welfare of women and children who are otherwise not recognized by the state.

William Gueraiche's work is the first scholarly study of the UAE's campaign to establish itself on the international stage and to explore the impact that its economic transformation has had on the country. Emirati society remains at core conservative and the preservation of Arab-Islamic identity remains important, yet the UAE has the highest proportion of foreigners of any country in the world. What does this mean for the identity of Emiratis living there and what are the implications for foreigners working there? The author also explores the environmental costs of the Dubai lifestyle, its 'Look East' policy and increasing volume of trade with eastern Asia, and the ways in which the UAE has sought to challenge the traditional hegemony of Saudi Arabia in the region. In a final chapter the author examines the impact of the economic depression that called the whole representation of Dubai into question.

Sayyid Qutb is widely considered the guiding intellectual of radical Islam, with a direct line connecting him to Osama bin Laden. But Qutb has too often been treated maliciously or reductively-"the Philosopher of Islamic Terror," as Paul Berman famously put it in the New York Times Magazine.
James Toth offers an even-handed account of Sayyid Qutb and shows him to be a much more complex figure than the many one-dimensional portraits would have us believe. Qutb first gained notice as a novelist, literary critic, and poet but then turned to religious and political criticism aimed at the Egyptian government and Muslims he deemed insufficiently pious. After a two-year sojourn in the U.S., he returned to Egypt even more radicalized and joined the Muslim Brotherhood, eventually taking charge of its propaganda operation. When Brotherhood members were accused of assassinating Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, the group was outlawed and Qutb imprisoned. He was executed in 1966, becoming the first martyr to the Islamist cause. Using an analytical approach that investigates without passing judgment, Toth traces the life and thought of Qutb, giving attention not only to his well-known Signposts on the Road, but also to his less-studied works like Social Justice in Islam and his 30-volume Qur'anic commentary, In the Shade of the Qur'an. Toth's aim is to give Qutb's ideas a fair hearing, to measure their impact, and to treat him like other intellectuals who inspire revolutions, however unpopular they may be.
In offering a more nuanced account of Qutb, one that moves beyond the cartoonish depictions of him as the evil genius lurking behind today's terrorists, Sayyid Qutb deepens our understanding of a central figure of radical Islam and, indeed, our understanding of radical Islam itself.

Using the methodology of modern scholars in the fields of Arabic lexicography, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, Tunisian feminist scholar Olfa Youssef investigates the rulings about inheritance, marriage, and homosexuality in the Qur'anic text itself and compares them with the interpretations provided by male Muslim theologians and legal scholars from medieval times to the present. In this book, she makes five central arguments: (1) There is a discrepancy between the layered signification in the Qur'anic text itself and the sutured explanations by religious scholars which have been enacted into law in many Muslim countries today; (2) the plurality of meanings is the quintessential essence of the Qur'an as evidenced in the absence of any sura over which there was unanimous agreement among Muslim scholars; (3) when male privilege was at stake, male legal scholars, to protect their own interests, ignored the divine text and based their rulings on human consensus; (4) Muslim medieval views on gender and homosexuality were more tolerant than contemporary ones; and finally (5), preferring indetermination and perplexity over the finality and certainties found in the judgements of male theologians, Youssef argues that only God knows the Qur'an's true meaning. Her job as a Muslim female scholar is only to raise questions over those human interpretations that many Muslim societies mistake for divine will.

The phenomenal growth of Islamic finance in the last few decades has been accompanied by a host of interesting questions and challenges. One of the critical challenges is how Islamic financial institutions can be motivated to participate in the 'equity-like' profit-and-loss sharing (PLS) contracts. It is observed that Islamic banks are reluctant to participate in the pure PLS scheme which is manifested by the rising concentration of investment on murabaha or mark-up financing. This phenomenon has been the hotbed of academic criticism on the contemporary practice of Islamic banking. This book explains the 'murabaha syndrome' in light of the incentive provided by the current institutional framework and what are the changes required in the governance structure to mend this anomaly.

The main objective of this book is to develop the framework of the "shuratic" process that establishes interactions between the ethical principles of Islam, the instruments and institutions of ethical policy and the market system. The market system is thus shown as the arena where "shuratic" policies and Islamic principles flourish side by side toward bringing about the integration between the Islamic polity and the grand ecological order of which the market system is a specific subset. The development of the key principles and instruments of the Islamic ethico-economic order is given in a rigorous scientific relevance based on the epistemological foundations of the Quran and "Sunnah". From these fundamental beginnings the book rapidly unfolds into the logistics of the polity-market integration process, termed throughout the book as the "shuratic" process. The labyrinth of transformations, interrelationships and scientific meaningness of these relations are shown to lead into dimensions in economic theory and economic discipline. The Principles of the Islamic economy are, the principle of "Tawhid" and solidarity, the Principle of Felicity linked to the Principle of "Tawhid", the Pr

Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism proposes a strikingly original thesis-that capitalism first emerged in Arabia, not in late medieval Italian city states as is commonly assumed. Early Islam made a seminal but largely unrecognized contribution to the history of economic thought; it is the only religion founded by an entrepreneur. Descending from an elite dynasty of religious, civil, and commercial leaders, Muhammad was a successful businessman before founding Islam. As such, the new religion had much to say on trade, consumer protection, business ethics, and property. As Islam rapidly spread across the region so did the economic teachings of early Islam, which eventually made their way to Europe. Early Islam and the Birth of Capitalism demonstrates how Islamic institutions and business practices were adopted and adapted in Venice and Genoa. These financial innovations include the invention of the corporation, business management techniques, commercial arithmetic, and monetary reform. There were other Islamic institutions assimilated in Europe: charities, the waqf, inspired trusts, and institutions of higher learning; the madrasas were models for the oldest colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. As such, it can be rightfully said that these essential aspects of capitalist thought all have Islamic roots.

Little has been published in English about Islam in Denmark although interest grew after the cartoons crisis of 2005-6. Danish research on the subject is extensive, and this volume aims to present some of the most recent to an international audience. While many of the circumstances which apply across western Europe - the history of immigration and refugees, settlement, the growth of Muslim organizations and international links, challenges of social and cultural encounter, and more recently Islam as a security issue - also apply in Denmark, there are also differences. A small, compact country with no recent imperial history, Denmark's unified institutional, religious and social culture can make it difficult for newcomers to integrate. The fourteen chapters in this book cover the topic in three parts. The first part deals with the history and statistics of immigration and settlement, and the religious institutional responses, Christian and Muslim. Part two looks at specific issues and the interaction with the developing national debate about identity and minority. Finally part three presents the experience of four active participants in the processes of integration: youth work and hospital chaplaincy, interreligious dialogue, and the views of an imam.

Roshan Iqbal traces the intellectual legacy of the exegesis of Qur'an 4:24, which is used as the proof text for the permissibility of mut'a (temporary marriage) and asks if the use of verse 4.24 for the permissibility of mut'a marriage is justified within the rules and regulations of Qur'anic hermeneutics. Iqbal examines seventeen Qur'an commentaries, the chronological span of which extends from the first extant commentary to the present day in three major Islamicate languages. Iqbal concludes that doctrinal self-identity, rather than strictly philological analyses, shaped the interpretation of this verse. As Western academia's first comprehensive work concerning the intellectual history of mut'a marriage and sexual ethics, this work illustrates the power of sectarian influences on how scholars have interpreted verse 4:24. This book is the only work in English that includes a plurality of voices from minor schools (Ibadi, Ashari, Zaidi, and Ismaili) largely neglected by Western scholars, alongside major schools, and draws from all available sub-genres of exegesis. Further, by revealing ambiguities in the interpretation of mut'a, this work challenges accepted sexual ethics in Islamic thought-as presented by most classical and many modern Muslim scholars-and thus opens up space to theorize Islamic sexual ethics anew and contribute to this crucial conversation from the perspective of Muslim feminism.

This book charts the evolution of Islamic dialectical theory (jadal) over a four-hundred year period. It includes an extensive study of the development of methods of disputation in Islamic theology (kalam) and jurisprudence (usul al-fiqh) from the tenth through the fourteenth centuries. The author uses the theoretical writings of Islamic theologians, jurists, and philosophers to describe the concept Overall, this investigation looks at the extent to which the development of Islamic modes of disputation is rooted in Aristotle and the classical tradition. The author reconstructs the contents of the earliest systematic treatment of the subject by b. al-Riwandi. He then contrasts the theological understanding of dialectic with the teachings of the Arab Aristotelians-al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. Next, the monograph shows how jurists took over the theological method of dialectic and applied it to problems peculiar to jurisprudence. Although the earliest writings on dialectic are fairly free of direct Aristotelian influence, there are coincidences of themes and treatment. But after jurisprudence had assimilated the techniques of theological dialectic, its own theory became increasingly influenced by logical terminology and techniques. At the end of the thirteenth century there arose a new discipline, the adab al-bahth. While the theoretical underpinnings of the new system are Aristotelian, the terminology and order of debate place it firmly in the Islamic tradition of disputation.

An estimated 3,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel currently volunteer to serve in the Israeli military, a force fighting other Palestinians just miles away in occupied territories. "Surrounded" takes a close look at this controversial group of soldiers, examining the complex reasons these people join the army and the wider implications of their decisions in terms of security and citizenship.
Most observers perceive a clear and powerful divide in the political tensions and open hostilities between the State of Israel and the Palestinian people, but often fail to notice those who straddle this divide--Palestinian citizens of Israel. These soldiers comprise no more than half a percent of this population, but their stories provide a powerful vantage point from which to consider a question faced by all Palestinians in Israel: to what extent are they, in fact, Israeli?
"Surrounded" contains over seventy interviews with soldiers, and provides a unique glimpse of their conflicting experiences of acceptance, integration, and marginalization within the Israeli military. Concluding with comparisons to similar situations around the world, the book upends nationalist understandings of how wars and those who fight in them work. A key to a more complex understanding of ethnic conflict, this gripping and revealing look at a select group of soldiers will immensely alter ideas about the reasons why people choose to fight, particularly on "the wrong side" of a war.

This groundbreaking book explores resistance against the harsh policing of sexuality in some Muslim societies. Many Muslim majority countries still use religious discourse to enforce stigmatization and repression of those, especially women, who do not conform to sexual norms promoted either by the state or by non-state actors. In this context, Islam is often stigmatized in Western discourse for being intrinsically restrictive with respect to women's rights and sexuality. The authors show that conservative Muslim discourse does not necessarily match practices of believers or of citizens and that women's empowerment is facilitated where indigenous and culturally appropriate strategies are developed. Using case studies from Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, Israel and India, they argue persuasively that Muslim religious traditions do not necessarily lead to conservative agendas but can promote emancipatory standpoints. An intervention to the construction of 'Muslim women' as uniformly subordinate, this collection spearheads an unprecedented wake of organizing around sexualities in Muslim communities.

Lone Star Muslims offers an engaging and insightful look at contemporary Muslim American life in Texas. It illuminates the dynamics of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, a city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the south and southwestern United States. Drawing on interviews and participant observation at radio stations, festivals, and ethnic businesses, the volume explores everyday Muslim lives at the intersection of race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, and religious sectarian affiliation to demonstrate the complexity of the South Asian experience. Importantly, the volume incorporates narratives of gay Muslim American men of Pakistani descent, countering the presumed heteronormativity evident in most of the social science scholarship on Muslim Americans and revealing deeply felt affiliations to Islam through ritual and practice. It also includes narratives of members of the highly skilled Shia Ismaili Muslim labor force employed in corporate America, of Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs, the working class and the working poor employed in Pakistani ethnic businesses, of community activists, and of radio program hosts. Decentering dominant framings that flatten understandings of transnational Islam and Muslim Americans, such as "terrorist" on the one hand, and "model minority" on the other, Lone Star Muslims offers a glimpse into a variety of lived experiences. It shows how specificities of class, Islamic sectarian affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality shape transnational identities and mediate racism, marginalities, and abjection.

The spread of Salafism-often referred to as Wahhabism-in the West has intrigued and alarmed observers since the attacks of 9/11. Many see it as a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that condones the subjugation of women and fuels Jihadist extremism. This view depicts Salafi women as the hapless victims of a fanatical version of Islam. Yet in Britain, growing numbers of educated women-often converts or from less conservative Muslim backgrounds-are actively choosing to embrace Salafism's literalist beliefs and strict regulations, including heavy veiling, wifely obedience, and seclusion from non-related men. How do these young women reconcile such difficult demands with their desire for university education, fulfilling careers, and suitable husbands? How do their beliefs affect their love lives and other relationships? And why do they become Salafi in the first place? Anabel Inge has gained unprecedented access to Salafi womens groups in the United Kingdom to provide the first in-depth account of their lives. Drawing on more than two years of ethnographic fieldwork in London, she examines why Salafism is attracting so many young Somalis, Afro-Caribbean converts, and others. But she also reveals the personal dilemmas they confront. This ground-breaking, lucid, and richly detailed book will be of vital interest to scholars, policy-makers, journalists, and general readers.

Presents oral histories and interviews of women who belong to Nation of Islam With vocal public figures such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam often appears to be a male-centric religious movement, and over 60 years of scholarship have perpetuated that notion. Yet, women have been pivotal in the NOI's development, playing a major role in creating the public image that made it appealing and captivating. Women of the Nation draws on oral histories and interviews with approximately 100 women across several cities to provide an overview of women's historical contributions and their varied experiences of the NOI, including both its continuing community under Farrakhan and its offshoot into Sunni Islam under Imam W.D. Mohammed. The authors examine how women have interpreted and navigated the NOI's gender ideologies and practices, illuminating the experiences of African-American, Latina, and Native American women within the NOI and their changing roles within this patriarchal movement. The book argues that the Nation of Islam experience for women has been characterized by an expression of Islam sensitive to American cultural messages about race and gender, but also by gender and race ideals in the Islamic tradition. It offers the first exhaustive study of women's experiences in both the NOI and the W.D. Mohammed community.

The Hizmet (Service) Movement of Fethullah Gulen is Turkey's most influential Islamic identity community. Widely praised throughout the early 2000s as a mild and moderate variation on Islamic political identity, the Gulen Movement has long been a topic of both adulation and conspiracy in Turkey, and has become more controversial as it spreads across the world. In Gulen, Joshua D. Hendrick suggests that when analyzed in accordance with its political and economic impact, the Gulen Movement, despite both praise and criticism, should be given credit for playing a significant role in Turkey's rise to global prominence. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Turkey and the U.S., Hendrick examines the Gulen Movement's role in Turkey's recent rise, as well as its strategic relationship with Turkey's Justice and Development Party-led government. He argues that the movement's growth and impact both inside and outside Turkey position both its leader and its followers as indicative of a post political turn in twenty-first century Islamic political identity in general, and as illustrative of Turkey's political, economic, and cultural transformation in particular. Joshua D. Hendrick is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Global Studies at Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore.

This book shows the results of my doctoral thesis in Social Sciences about the construction of Muslim identities in Sao Paulo, the state which receives more Muslim immigrants in Brazil. The issue of construction of identities of this religious minority was undertaken in relation to: a) the pressures of Brazilian society, characterized by the strong presence of Catholicism, the growth of Protestantism, the fundamentally Western culture, the secular state, the dependency of the USA and the tradition of welcoming immigrants and absorbing them in a process of Brazilianization; b) the impact of globalization over this minority group, both in the sense of the propagation of negative stereotypes in relation to Islam and its faithful, as a consequence of the influence of the Orientalist media and academia, as well as the sense of strengthening of the bonds of the diaspora with the rest of the Muslim world; c) the internal negotiations between immigrants and converts and between men and women for the definition of what is a Muslim; and d) the possible appearance of different Islamic practices and discourses generated by diversified occupations, ethnicities and spatial distributions, through the comparative study of the Muslim communities of Campinas and Sao Paulo city. Besides illustrating the variety of values, conceptions and beliefs Muslims have in Brazil, this work intends to facilitate the perception of what is a product of the national and cultural context and what is a product of global tendencies that influence Muslim minorities throughout the world, presenting a comparative research between the Muslim communities in Brazil and the Netherlands.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Historically, countering terrorism has been something that security services have carried out on behalf of the state, without community consultation or consent. Since 9/11 however, this tradition has increasingly been questioned and the idea that communities have the potential to defeat al Qaeda - related or influenced terrorism has gained ascendency across policy, security and other contexts. Based on research in the US, Britain and Northern Ireland, this book examines the involvement of Muslim and other communities in terror crime prevention work, exploring the complexities of community involvement as well as its advantages and examining how trusting relationships between police, security services and communities can be built.

When Guinean Muslims leave their homeland, they encounter radically new versions of Islam and new approaches to religion more generally. In Remaking Islam in African Portugal, Michelle C. Johnson explores the religious lives of these migrants in the context of diaspora. Since Islam arrived in West Africa centuries ago, Muslims in this region have long conflated ethnicity and Islam, such that to be Mandinga or Fula is also to be Muslim. But as they increasingly encounter Muslims not from Africa, as well as other ways of being Muslim, they must question and revise their understanding of "proper" Muslim belief and practice. Many men, in particular, begin to separate African custom from global Islam. Johnson maintains that this cultural intersection is highly gendered as she shows how Guinean Muslim men in Lisbon-especially those who can read Arabic, have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and attend Friday prayer at Lisbon's central mosque-aspire to be cosmopolitan Muslims. By contrast, Guinean women-many of whom never studied the Qur'an, do not read Arabic, and feel excluded from the mosque-remain more comfortably rooted in African custom. In response, these women have created a "culture club" as an alternative Muslim space where they can celebrate life course rituals and Muslim holidays on their own terms. Remaking Islam in African Portugal highlights what being Muslim means in urban Europe and how Guinean migrants' relationships to their ritual practices must change as they remake themselves and their religion.