The Essentials of Islamic Banking, Finance, and Capital Markets.

AuthorJalili, Reza

Kuforiji, John Oluseyi. The Essentials of Islamic Banking, Finance, and Capital Markets. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019.

MIDDLE EAST AND NORTH AFRICA

This book could be illuminating for students of Islamic economics. The collection promises to cover a vast ground and consequently raises the readers expectations for a feast of information and discoveries. Generally, a book of this nature should at least be informative and at best, discuss and evaluate underlying foundational theories and pertinent issues. Alas this book fails in delivery. It is plagued with errors, typos, grammatical mistakes, unsubstantiated claims, redundancies, and irrelevant discussions. It leaves the big questions unresolved.

The book, which reads like a student's notes taken from a series of lectures, must be thoroughly re-edited. It contains more than one hundred spelling and grammatical errors. Several of these errors are clearly the misunderstanding of the words, while others are outright mistakes. One can point to errors like Arab instead of Arabic (5), capitalism instead of capitalist (16), up-spring instead of off-spring (18), sacred instead of scarce (19), mobilizes instead of mobilize (187), and other instead of order (242). The book also lacks scholarly citation, although a few references are clustered together at the end of the book without any reference to the text. Many assertions, some of which are dubious at best, are made without any reference. A sample includes: Muslims lived in peace after unification of Arabia (11), Islamic economics does not subscribe to ideas of profit maximization, cost minimization, benefit maximization, or self-interest (21), banks do not assume any risk and the depositors bear all the risk (112), and the first check was introduced in Baghdad (184). Furthermore, many Arabic terms and concepts have not been defined or explained. Several Arabic terms, such as sahih, batil, nafidh, murabehah, musharekah, and Tawarruq, are not included in the index. The book also contains several factual errors: enumerating Darussalam (a city in Tanzania) as a country (4); missing some categories on which Islamic taxes may be spent (8); spoken language of people of Arabia being Greek (6); and not including Sunnah as a foundation of an Islamic state's laws (8).

Throughout the book, the reader is faced with a question: "Is something Islamic because it is done by Muslims and Islamic societies, or it is Islamic because it is ordered by Islam and...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT