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Principles of Islamic Banking Essay

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INTRODUCTION
The basic concept of Islamic banking which is also known as 'interest-free banking' is based on basic ethical standards with just one main difference- Muslims are not allowed to pay or receive interest. This does not mean that business activities or making a profit are not encouraged, they are but as long as they don’t involve interest in any form. To fulfil this purpose, financial instruments have been introduced by the Islamic financial institutions to satisfy these requirements. An example that can be seen is that equity financing is used instead of debt financing. Furthermore, instead of giving a fixed interest rate on the savings account, Islamic banks offer a share of the bank's profit, as a return on deposits and …show more content…

The early seventies saw the institutional involvement. The Islamic Development Bank, an inter-governmental bank was established in 1975. The first private interest-free bank, the Dubai Islamic Bank was also setup in 1975 by a group of businessmen from several countries. Two more private banks were founded in 1977 under the name of Faisal Islamic Bank in Egypt and Sudan. Twenty-five years since the establishment of the first Islamic bank, more than 150 Islamic institutions have come into existence. Though most of these are in Muslim countries, there are some in Western Europe as well as in North America and Asia. PRINCIPLES OF ISLAMIC BANKING
The Islamic banking system follows certain, yet simple, rules set by the Qur’an and the Shari’ah (Islamic law), which if deviated from the system becomes un-Islamic. These are summarized as follows:

1. Any predetermined payment or benefit over and above the actual amount of principal is prohibited:

Islam allows only the type of loan in which interest of any form is not charged. Interest in this case is in either monetary form or other beneficiary forms such as using the borrower’s property, etc. in return for the lent money. In other words, any type of benefit received by the lender from the borrower in return for lending the money is prohibited. This is different however from the concept of ‘profit-sharing’ which will be explained next. This is different from the typical loan types of commercial

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