402 chapter nine
community, imported ideas may not be necessarily workable or applic-
able to the needs of that community; this is not new, we all know
it, but there is a need to (b) emphasize that Islam is able to gener-
ate its own ideas, including those of Islamic economics. If Islamic
economics cannot produce its own ideas without them, simply reflecting
the style of western economics, this provides very little evidence that
Islamic economics can be viewed as a subject on its own; it might
be a subordinate or a branch of the subject of economics, even with
the prefix “normative”. And as a quick reminder, if a reminder is
needed, when medieval Muslim writers wrote on Islamic economics
they wrote on “Earnings”, “Wealth”, “Earnings and Asceticism”,
“Good Trading”, and “State Ordinance”, as well as on “Kharàj”
and “Œìsbah”. They did not feel the need to emphasise their Islamic
“perspectives”. True, the literature of today is far vaster than that
of the past, but to overcome the problem writing on Islamic eco-
nomics may come under one central catalogue: Islamic economics.
On the application side of the Islamic economic ideal to real life
practical situation, one of the most vivid examples is, and has been
for sometime, Islamic banking. What started as a small size savings
bank in a remote village in Egypt and another in Pakistan in the
early nineteen sixties has grown to become a major financial sector
of Islamic banking and finance in the late twentieth and early twenty
first century. Claiming about 200 banks in the world today with total
assets of $300 billion, total capital of $50 billion and total deposits
of $170 billion, this is a major achievement by any standard.
Nevertheless there are problems and in order to look forward to
having a much more coherent base for Islamic finance in the future
these problems need to be addressed. This has not been ignored and
Islamic economists have been engaged in a critical evaluation of
these problems with a view to either answering the criticism or
genuinely seeking ways of solving them. Some of these problems are
as follows (for a detailed discussion of these problems, see for exam-
ple the Future of Economics, Chapra 2000).
- The lack of product standardisation of the services provided by
Islamic banks and financial institutions. This is mainly a result of
not having a centralised Sharì"ah board to which all Islamic banks
should refer to for advice and religious opinions (Chapra, 2000).
This brings to mind a similar situation when there is no stan-
dardised accounting system and accounting issues are resolved, within