Reshaping the Islamic Finance Industry Applying the Lessons Learnt from the Global Financial Crisis

Reshaping the Islamic Finance Industry Applying the Lessons Learnt from the Global Financial Crisis
Rafe Haneef, Research Fellow, ISRA & Edib Smolo, Researcher, ISRA
ISRA Research Paper (No. 11/2010)

"In the last 27 years, the world has witnessed more than 124 distinct financial crises. The financial meltdown caused by the current global financial crisis brought the financial world to its knees. This paper aims to discuss how the Islamic finance industry can reshape itself by learning lessons from the global financial crisis. To achieve this aim, the paper first identifies the lessons that can be learnt from the crisis including risk transfer & imprudent credit growth, failure of risk management, liquidity and leverage, lax regulation and opaque disclosure. The paper then suggests how the economic agents’ behavior and responsibilities could be reshaped by highlighting the sellers’ standard of care and regulatory responsibility. The paper concludes that the global financial crisis revealed the weaknesses of the global financial architecture on one side and provided an opportunity for Islamic finance to show its inherent strengths and qualities on the other. To facilitate this, the paper offers some possible Shari‘ah-based solutions that can help the financial world avoid similar crises in the future."

Reshaping the Islamic Finance Industry Applying the Lessons Learnt from the Global Financial Crisis