Riba: Usury or Interest

Sukuk are an important asset class which has captured the attention of a wide range of issuers and investors, regulators and sovereigns, and academics and market players. The sukuk industry has made remarkable leaps since its modern inception in the 1990s. It has grown in size and volume, evolved in structural possibilities, and successfully expanded the boundaries of the Islamic capital market to far-flung jurisdictions worldwide. Its promising future has led the International Shari’ah Research Academy for Islamic Finance (ISRA) and Securities Commission Malaysia (SC Malaysia) to collaborate to provide essential and comprehensive knowledge on this key instrument of the Islamic capital market.

This valuable work presents Ibn Taimiyah’s thoughts on the concept of Islamic economics, the state in the economy, on public finance, money, interest, prices, partnership, and profit-sharing, and offers a comparison of his ideas with those of some medieval scholars in Europe, along with a study of his influence on Islamic thinkers in later periods.

This work charts new territory in Islamic scholarship by attempting to address the field of public policy from a maqasid (higher objectives of the Shariah) perspective. Public Policy is an independent discipline from both law and politics. Thus, Public Policy in Islam is introduced here as a qualitatively different enterprise from both fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) and siyasah shar’iyyah (Shariah-oriented politics). The book deals with a number of critical topics that include methodology, governance, human rights, ethics, political power, and reform and renewal. It highlights how the maqasid approach is indispensable to the theory and practice of public policy in Islam, how it could resolve some of the most persistent governance dilemmas throughout Muslim history, but more significantly, how it forces a re-conceptualization of the wealth of knowledge available in Islam s primary sources to introduce Public Policy in Islam to mainstream policy studies.