Chapter in Book

After slightly more than five decades of embracing Islamic banking through the establishment of the Pilgrims Fund (Tabung Haji) in 1963 and Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad in 1983, Malaysia today is an icon of Islamic banking and finance, surpassing many other financial centres in the world. The most striking achievements for Malaysia include the rapid growth of Islamic financial assets, the global leader status in the issuance of sukuk or Islamic bond and the robust legal and regulatory infrastructure that has been put in place... Available in physical copy only (Call Number: HG 3368 A6 I82Mo)

Islamic banks are highly incorporated with social issues because of their rules and regulations. Profit not only depends on its own return and investment but also on trust, moral issues which may be more related to banking profitability. To test these gaps, this chapter attempts to investigate the socioeconomic factors along with bank-specific factors of global Islamic banks using dynamic GMM and Quantile regression. The dataset used in this study involves 55 full-fledged Islamic Banks from 24 countries across the globe. The results suggest that Return on Assets (ROA) is significantly positive to bank-specific factors such as credit risk has and statistically negative to cost-to-income ratio. Available in physical copy and e-book (Call Number: HG 187.4 M174)

Mutual help and guarantee have been the ordinary practice of tribal Arabs even before the advent of Islam in Arabia. A similar but refined concept was reinforced by the Qur'an to be adopted by Muslims. It was widely applied in their daily lives. When the Muslims extended their trade by sea to the Far East, the concept of mutual assistance became more prominent and organised to protect their ships, merchandise and even lives from all sorts of dangers and mishaps. The practice by these merchants to put aside a sum of money before setting sail to the Far East for trade as a fund to compensate any loss incurred by any of them became the most prominent practice that led to the birth of what is today known as marine insurance. To circumvent some of the shari'ah non-compliant practices of mainstream insurance is the introduction of the concept of donating part of the participants' contribution which forms the special fund to compensate losses. From then on, the takaful operators started to emerge, first in Sudan and later in other parts of the Muslim world. Several models have been formulated, namely mudarabah, modified mudarabah, wakalah and wakalah-waqf. The success of the takaful companies around the world has also been strongly influenced by the recent upsurge in the petroleum price that has led to the unprecedented increase in sovereign and private wealth. The recent emergence of "re-takaful" companies add up further to the rapid growth in takaful operators and funds. Despite the success stories, there are a number of serious challenges facing takaful and "re-takaful" operators which are worth noting.

Quite apart from the distinct dichotomy of man's life into the secular and spiritual, conventional economics is still plagued with undue emphasis on the positive at the expense of the normative treatment of the subject. 'What is' becomes the norm, in fact, the rule rather than 'what ought'.