IslamicFinance.de

In November 2007 Islamic finance, which until then had been soaring on the back of a bullish economy and a climate of more liberal interpretation, hit its first weak point.
Sheikh?Muhammad?Taqi Usmani, head of the religious board at the Accounting and Auditing Organisation for ­Islamic Financial Institutions - the body that sets standards for Islamic finance products - declared that around 85 per cent of the sukuk in issuance broke key principles of Islam and were not sharia-­compliant.
But it is coming back. Islamic finance as a whole, of course, never really went away. Its ups and downs merely mirrored those of conventional finance, with some exceptions - shortly after Lehman Brothers went bust investors fled conventional funds for the perceived haven of sharia-compliant structures and all things Middle Eastern. Large restructurings, such as that of Dubai World subsidiary Nakheel (see box) and Kuwait Investment Dar, characterised the market and new-money deals were few and far between.