Mohammad Hashim Kamali

This article explores human dignity through a reading of the Qur‟an and hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad), the two most authoritative and widely venerated sources of Islam. It is presented in four sections, beginning with a review of the textual evidence on human dignity, to be followed by a similar review of God-man relationship, then also a discussion as to how the Qur‟an guides and depicts as to how the humans should relate to one another while observant of each other‟s dignity. The discussion proceeds to examine the juristic positions of the leading schools of Islamic law on the subject, and ends with a conclusion that underscores the effects of these guidelines on the realities of Muslim life.

Mahmoud A. El-Gamal
Rice University

Abstract

Islamic finance is a prohibitions-driven industry, which aims primarily to circumvent the canonical Islamic prohibitions of riba and gharar. The concepts of riba and gharar may best be understood as unbundled sales of credit and risk, respectively. An obvious solution is to adopt mutual structures for financial intermediaries of credit (e.g.banks) and risk (e.g. insurance companies), as early experiments in Islamic finance had apparently done. However, growth in Islamic finance over the past three decades has been led by rent-seeking Shari`a arbitrageurs, whose efforts continue to be focused on synthesizing contemporary financial products and services from classical nominate contracts, without regard to corporate structure of financial institutions. In this paper, I argue that mutuality should be given back its central role in our discourse on Islamic finance. In particular, I argue that mutuality in intermediation of credit and risk can assist significantly in implementing the substance of Shari`a as well as its forms, including the financial empowerment of Islamic financial customers (be they Muslims or otherwise) to face the challenging domination of Islamic finance by international financial behemoths.

Rodney Wilson
New York: New York University Press, 1997
233 P. (including a bibliography and an index).

Reviewed by:
SYED NAWAB HAIDER NAQVI
Rector, Kausar University of Sciences, Islamabad.

Rodney Wilson's book aims to highlight the religious-ethical basis of economic actions through the kaleidoscope of` "comparative religions perspectives on economics" (p. 21). The economic teachings of the three great religions in the Abrahamic tradition - namely, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam - are juxtaposed here in one volume to facilitate a fruitful inter-religious dialogue on common moral and economic concerns of a modern society. Wilson, "as a Christian who has participated in interfaith dialogue" (p. 2), was well-placed to write such a wide-ranging, wellresearched work which seeks to unite, rather than divide, the 'peoples of the Book', a welcome news for those who would rather reject the dark forebodings of the "Clash of Civilizations". He draws freely on a large number of writings of 'authentic' exponents of the Judaic, Christian and Islamic points of view and compares, without being polemical, their competing but mostly complementary (if seen in the 'correct' historic sequence), positions on economic matters. Written in a racy, persuasive style, the book impresses the reader as a work of significant scholarship.