Integrating Islamic Finance Into the Mainstream: Regulation, Standardization and Transparency

This is the second publication of the Islamic Finance Project (IFP)
following its relocation to the Harvard Law School Islamic Studies
Program. The Seventh Harvard University Forum on Islamic Finance is
part of a conference series hosted by the IFP on a biannual basis and brings
together experts from all fields related to Islamic finance to discuss issues
currently confronting the industry. This year the forum was entitled
“Integrating Islamic Finance into the Mainstream: Regulation,
Standardization, and Transparency” and addressed the issues arising as
Islamic finance grows and interacts with the conventional finance
community. The proceedings of this forum, published here, include eleven
papers selected from the twenty-four that were presented during the
conference. For the first time, a pre-conference workshop was also held,
entitled “Select Ethical and Methodological Issues in Shari‘a-Compliant
Finance.” In this workshop, specific issues regarding the legal and moral
problems that arise within Islamic finance were discussed by a number of
pre-eminent scholars who were present at the conference. The workshop
took place behind closed doors due to the sensitivity of the subject matter.
Here we have included the position paper presented by M. Nejatullah
Siddiqi at the pre-conference workshop, which elaborates upon the role of
shari‘a experts in the economics and progress of the multidisciplinary field
of Islamic finance. We thank Ibrahim Warde, Adjunct Professor at the
Fletcher School of Diplomacy, Tufts University for contributing an
excellent introduction to this publication.