Browsing by Author "Ayinde, Olorogun Lukman"

Money in the form of hard currency was introduced in ancient times to overcome the obstacles posed by barter trade. Instead of goods being exchanged for goods with an approximately equal value, goods were bought and sold in the form of gold, silver or other precious metals. Only in later times, coins which worth their actual value were replaced by paper money, and their value guaranteed by the public treasuries of the issuing countries. These modern forms of currency are the basis of modern economies all over the world, the developed and the developing alike. Muslim countries are generally classified as ‘emerging markets’ based on the exchange power of their currencies on international markets. Following the lobbyists of leading economic countries – through their posited institutions such as IMF and World Bank -- the US dollar and European Euro form the major currencies while other currencies – among them the 58 OIC countries -- have been relegated to serving only as ordinary domestic means of transactions. The governments of all 58 Muslim countries are currently using US dollar and Euro in their international transactions. Fatwas issued on the permissibility of relying on foreign – and more importantly non-Muslim – currencies. This research aims to re-evaluate such an alleged permissibility based on independent reasoning (ijtihad) and the reinterpretation of the revealed text (Qur`an). The researcher discovered that their interpretations and applications of the revealed text with regard to the permissibility of foreign currency exchanges are untenable and go against Islamic compliant transactions. There exist numerous contradictory Islamic legal rulings which have no basis in the Qur`an and Sunnah forwarded by some scholars of Islamic Law to justify their position. The researcher concludes with a call to establish the Gold Dinar as a legitimate means of foreign exchange for Muslim economies. Muslim states have the obligation to emancipate themselves from their lamentable dependence on Western countries.

Islamic financial institutions (IFIs) emerged as viable alternatives to conventional financial institutions. The Islamic insurance scheme is a vital ancillary to Islamic financial institutions providing services similar to that of conventional insurance. Islamic insurance however, differs from conventional insurance schemes in terms of ownership and forms of contract. Nonetheless, there have been calls by some contemporary Islamic jurists along with a number of Islamic insurance practitioners, that the Islamic insurance industry is currently not adequately empowering the industry in terms of growth, standardisation, and unification of regulations at both academic and market levels. Above all, it is failing to create sufficient competitive advantage for Islamic insurance against its conventional counterpart. Various efforts from state authorities, academics, and major market players to resolve these problems such as lack unified legal rulings, erroneous theory, and lack of enough expertise have thus far proved insufficient or bellied with flaws. With this in mind, the shortcomings in underwriting and rating of insurance products practices, which are central to insurance (conventional and Islamic alike), have gained little or no attention from academics and practitioners alike. Thus, this research generally, was concerned about the extent of reliability of Islamic insurance at academic and professional levels. In order to achieve the objectives of this research, qualitative research methods with dedicated analysis were employed as major tools to investigate and answer the questions. During the course of the investigation, a number of issues were discovered such as non-comprehensive definition, multiple trademark, erroneous theory and concepts, inconsistence models of operation, multiple and unstandardized juristic rulings etc. The research addresses these fundamental problems including provision of detailed definition, suggested universal trademark, developed new theory, proposed and proved Kaf?lah as an alternative operational model for the Islamic insurance industry, as well provided underwriting and rating considerations based on the Kaf?lah model from an Islamic perspective. To advance the adequateness of this research, the researcher provided tentative procedures of adopting Kaf?lah into the Islamic insurance discourse at both academic and market levels.