Intermediate Islamic finance.

Abstract

To the best knowledge of the authors, this book is the first intermediate-level addition to the class of textbooks on Islamic finance. Intermediate Islamic Finance can serve as a classroom material and professional reference book for practitioners and policymakers. The principal objective of this work is to foster a better understanding of the essence of Islamic finance. One possible and rarely explored way to achieve this aim is to present Islamic finance from an analytical perspective. Together with the rich literature of descriptive and informative exposés of the subject, the need for work that integrates the analytics of finance with themoral thrust of Islamic finance is indeed pressing. An analytical approach to Islamic finance is justified by the necessity of logical reasoning, as well as by the familiarity of readers with the theoretical foundations of conventional finance derived in the same approach. The present attempt to communicate the institutional and academic developments in Islamic finance using the same analytical methods poses some challenges. In contrast to advances in conventional finance theory, the literature on the analytics of Islamic finance remains scant. Efforts are made also to provide analytical perspectives while escaping excessive mathematics. A blend of analytical and intuitive arguments is thus used to draw the interest of readers toward points of possible convergence or conflict between Islamic finance and conventional finance. Intermediate Islamic Finance is a modest contribution to the ongoing efforts toward the preparation of textbooks for an integrated curriculum that is shaped, to one extent or another, by analytical arguments. The analytics of finance may aid in expressing the jurisprudential opinions and ideas about equity and justice, and the essence of Islamic finance in a different way. This analytical approach can also be useful in drawing parallels with conventional finance and economics. Thus, a corollary objective is to disseminate an intellectually comprehensible body of knowledge about Islamic finance for professionals who are well versed with models of asset valuation and risk analysis and hedging methods in conventional finance