Malaysia's overarching economic objective is to achieve developed country status by the year 2020. On the back of sluggish global economic condition and tight fiscal space, the economy will need to grow by a stable and rapid rate over the next few years. Currently, macroeconomic policies in Malaysia follow the conventional model based on the risk-transfer paradigm. Over the next decade, the potential for risk sharing as an alternative to risk transfer is expected to grow rapidly. As pointed out by a number of scholars and researchers, economies can be made more resilient to shocks by adopting financing methods that limit risk transfer (interest rate based debt contracts) and allow greater risk sharing among the market participants on a broad scale. Risk sharing is also the essence of Islamic finance.

Since the 2007/2008 financial crisis, research has revealed that all financial crises, such as banking or exchange rate crisis, have been, in essence, debt crises (see for example Reinhart & Rogoff, 2009, 2011). Further, econometric investigations have demonstrated that the chain of causation starts from fractional reserve-based credit expansion to debt increase to leverage expansion leading to crisis (see for example Turner, Haldane, Woolley, & et al., 2010). Moreover, post-crisis diagnostics have led to conclusion that conventional monetary policy has been unable to induce growth resumption ...