This book is the outcome of a joint effort of a number of senior practising professionals as well as leading research scholars and educators in Islamic finance. The result is a reliable book on the subject of sukuk securities. Though this type of security is new ro modern Islamic finance, it has its historical roots some centuries earlier as a novel instrument developed in the Turkish Empire based on earlier practices of government treasuries to raise money. Sukuk securities were first offered just about 20 years ago as part of a slew of new Islamic financial products to fund activities mostly over a finite horizon, since these are financing contracts priced not by using interest rates but by using returns on profit sharing- based contracts and asset- backing for the finance provided.

The sukuk securities or Islamic asset-backed debt securities truly started to be offered in organized markets as publicly listed instruments only in 2000, so at the time of writing it is a 12-year-old market. There is a record of its first private issue in 1978 in Saudi Arabia, after an article in Islamic Economic Studies some years earlier had suggested this instrument to be a suitable and safe debt instrument with safeguards for investors and being consistent with ethics long since forgotten in issuing debt instruments in past Islamic empires. It has since been widely accepted as an Islamic financial product for debt-raising with one important principle, namely asset ownership of part of the assets of a borrower which gives this instrument asset backing, a unique feature in debt markets. Historical reference to sukuk is found in the records of the Abbasid Empire established in circa 900 soon after Islam spread to the Byzantine region in what is known today as Jordan, Iraq, Palestine and Syria.