Vying for countless billions of Arab petrodollars, unexpected champions of “Islamic finance” have emerged in unlikely places. Most recently, the growing list has included Gordon Brown, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and officers of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Emerging financial centres in Bahrain, Dubai and Malaysia have grown with Islamic finance, but now the industry’s size has piqued the interest of more traditional centres.
Most notable has been the growth of the market for bond-like instruments known as sukuk – the plural of sakk, an Arabic precursor of cheque, meaning certificate of debt. Curiously, Eastern indulgences were called “absolution certificates” or sukuk al-ghufran. Other Arabic words have populated the world of Islamic finance: murabaha, ijara etc. Competition for this market niche has brought anglicised versions of those words into major conferences from New York to Singapore.
