- For example: M. Nejatullah Siddiqi,Muslim Economic Thinking, Islamic Foun-
dation, Leicester, England, 1981. Professor Siddiqi was responsible for this
highly praised work, which included for the first time some 700 references of
works in English, Arabic, and Urdu in the field of Islamic Economics. He is a
prolific author and was a LARIBA Fellow in Islamic Banking and Finance at
UCLA, California. - Philip T.N. Koh,Islamic Financial Instruments: The Civil Law and the Sharia
Confluence or Conflict?, presented at the 5th Islamic Finance Conference, Mon-
ash University, Kuala Lumpur. - Mahmoud Elgamal,Islamic Finance—Law, Economics, and Practice, Cam-
bridge University Press, Cambridge, England. Professor Mahmoud Amin Elga-
mal holds the first ever Islamic Economics Chair at Rice University. He is a
gifted researcher in economics, mathematics, game theory, and Islamic law, ec-
onomics, and practice. He authored a pioneering book in the field. His bitter
frustrations about the practices of scholars have landed him a lot of resistance
and, in many cases, isolation by many conference organizers. In fact,
some scholars refuse to appear in the same conference programs in which his
name appears. He coined an interesting term, ‘‘Shari’aa arbitrage,’’ by which
he means the added premium charged in Islamic banking and accepted by some
banks and customers that create an arbitrage between the Islamic banking tech-
niques and the conventional banking methods. His thesis has been that the
methods used in Islamic banking sanctioned by many Shari’aa scholars focus
on form and lack the real spirit and substance of the original Shari’aa sources,
and that these methods are inefficient and costly while in fact they are the same
as conventional banking.
11.USA Today, Web site posted 2/24/05 and updated 02/25/2005: http://www.usatoday.
com/money/perfi/general/2005-02-24-islamic-finance-usat_x.htm. - OCC, Interpretive Letters #806 (1997) and #867 (1999). Please visit http://www.
OCC.treas.gov. These letters were written regarding the United Bank of
Kuwait’s Al Manzil Program: The OCC has issued two opinion letters, one on
Murabaha and the other on Ijara home financing by the United Bank of Kuwait
(UBK), which has since been merged into what is now Shamel Bank in Bahrain;
the federal branch was closed in the early 2000s, only two years after it started
offering these contracts. - Ibid.
- Bernard Lawrence ‘‘Bernie’’ Madoff (born April 29, 1938) is an American busi-
nessman, and former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He founded
the Wall Street firm Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC in 1960 and
was its chairman until December 11, 2008, when he was charged with perpe-
trating what may be the largest investor fraud ever committed by a single per-
son. Prosecutors have accused financier Madoff—the alleged mastermind of a
$65 billion Ponzi scheme—of intending to transfer up to $100 million worth of
assets to protect them from seizure, and they want him locked up immediately.
Madoff was sentenced in June to 150 years in prison after admitting the fraud –
the largest in history.
278 THE ART OF ISLAMIC BANKING AND FINANCE