Islamic finance

The notion of “Islamic finance” was born during the tumultuous identity-politics years of the mid-twentieth century. Indian, Pakistani, and Arab thinkers contemplated independence from Britain, and independence of Pakistan from India, within a context of “Islamic society.” Islam was assumed to inspire political, economic, and financial systems that are distinctive and independent of the Western (Capitalist) and Eastern (Socialist) models of the epoch. The term “Islamic economics” was coined by Abu al-A`la AlMawdudi, whose students and followers worked to develop an ostensible Islamic social science (Kuran, 2004). Mawdudi's influence on Arab Islamists began with the writings of Sayid Qutb, the father of modern Arab political Islam, whose quasi-exegesis Under the Qur'anic Shade referred exclusively to Mawdudi's writings on economic matters. Mawdudi's migration from majority-Hindu Indian society to maority-Muslim Pakistan thus became a prototype for Islamist migration away from secular political and economic systems.