Recommended Books on Islamic Finance

Post By Mahmoud El Gamal

“Here’s a partial list of some recent books that I have found most useful to read:

• Saeed, Abdullah, Islamic Banking and Interest: A Study of the Prohibition of Riba and Its Contemporary Interpretation, Brill Academic Publishers, 1997. A wonderful scholarly work.
• Lewis, Mervin and Latifa Algaoud, Islamic Banking, Edward Elgar, Pub., 2001. A good survey with a nice interfaith introduction covering Abrahamic religious views on usury.
• Warde, Ibrahim, Islamic Finance in the Global Economy, Edinburgh University Press, 2000. The best political-economy coverage of Islamic finance that I have read.
• Henry, Clement and Rodney Wilson (eds.), The Politics of Islamic Finance, Edinburgh University Press, 2004. The best collection of essays on the political economy of Islamic finance that I have read. See, in particular, Dr. Monzer Kahf’s chapter.
• Vogel, Frank, and Samuel Hayes, Islamic Law and Finance:Religion, Risk, and Return, (paperback) Springer, 1998. Very scholarly work. Vogel’s part is a learned survey of classical jurisprudence and its interpretation by contemporary participants in Islamic finance. Hayes’s part is an example of superior Islamic financial engineering (of which I am not fond, but if one is to do it, it is better to do it right).
• Usmani, M. Taqi, An Introduction to Islamic Finance, Springer, 2002. This book was published earlier in Pakistan and elsewhere, and free versions were available online when I last checked. You can think of this as the bible for Islamic financial engineers. Justice Usmani is the most respected name on the “Shari`a scholar” circuit, so widely respected in fact that a number of his family members are quickly becoming prominent members of that scholar circuit as well as he nears retirement.
• Maurer, Bill, Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason, Princeton University Press, 2005. An anthropologist’s social scientific study of Islamic finance as a social phenomenon, with comparison to other unorthodox financial systems.
• Kuran, Timur, Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism, Princeton University Press, 2005. A collection of earlier essays by Timur Kuran, constituting the most blistering attack on the bulk of Islamic economics, revealing its political and economic failures, as well as its academic incoherence.”