Islamic Banking and Finance: Sacred Alignment, Strategic Alliances

This case study from Malaysia adds a new dimension to critiques of Islamic banking and finance (IBF) by studying various aspects of its agency and showing how its growth complements and sometimes supersedes its spiritual components, resulting in new power alignments. The first significant consequence of IBF has been its global role in an emergent multipolar financial and regulatory global space. Second, by the creation of new alliances and governing classes, it demonstrates a capacity for eschewing the encumbrances of older religious structures and institutions. IBF resonates well within the restructuring agenda of a post-neoliberal global financial order, while reshaping the meaning of religion through a post-secular worldview. Here is where the role of the new agents and authorial voices of Islamic commerce have become crucial in mediating the ethical and material tensions of IBF, acting as the free market reformers of once inflexible doctrines. Thus, the sustainability of IBF hinges upon the empowerment of this new class of secular agents. These agents of IBF find their legitimacy through the seemingly unlikely path of dereligionizing Islamic practices through commerce.