Impossible, Highly Desired Islamic Bank, The

The purpose of this Article is to explore, and explain the stubborn persistence of a central paradox that is endemic to the retail Islamic bank as it operates in the United States. The paradox is that retail Islamic banking in the United States is impossible, and yet it remains highly desired. It is impossible because central features of modern banking regulation conflict with fundamental aspects of shari'a as it is understood in modernity in the context of finance. It is unimaginable that regulators will create exceptions to, or somehow significantly amend, the modern financial regulatory system in the radical fashion necessary to accommodate Islamic finance. Yet notwithstanding such impossibility, Islamic banking is also highly desired in that there is a preoccupation with finding a way to enhance the very limited Islamic commercial banking opportunities that exist in the United States. This article will show that the paradox endures because the Islamic bank, and the accommodation of it within the U.S. regulatory sphere, is a powerful symbol for the accommodation of the broader, pious Muslim public. The pious Muslim eager to see an Islamic bank open in her neighborhood is at best only partly interested in adherence to religious doctrine. The Islamic bank is more importantly a reflection of a broader recognition of her space in the American fabric

Present at the Resurrection: Islamic Finance and Islamic Law

This short paper summarizes an extremely stimulating plenary session, held at the XVIIIth Congress of the International Academy of Comparative Law in Washington DC, dealing specifically with the topic of Islamic finance. The speakers were three renowned leaders in the field. Specifically, they were Kilian Balz, a partner at Amereller who has both practiced extensively in the field, and written about it while at the Harvard Islamic Legal Studies Program at Harvard Law School, Frank Vogel, coauthor of a leading book on Islamic finance and former director of the Islamic Legal Studies Program, and Mahmoud El Gamal, a prolific writer and fierce critic of the practice who also served as the appointed Islamic finance scholar in residence at the Department of the Treasury in 2004

Book Review: Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus

In his work, "Islam and Liberal Citizenship: The Search for an Overlapping Consensus", Professor Andrew March has provided a rare, much needed, rigorous and admirable foray into a subject on which there has been much discussion, but not much of it very good. There are few who are able to discuss Islam, or political liberalism for that matter, as thoroughly as March, and all of us interested in the subject should be grateful for the contribution he has provided.\ud \ud Nevertheless, there is a central problem with the approach March has adopted, which divorces doctrine nearly entirely from praxis. Specifically, March rarely discusses the doctrine, and its evolution, with reference to how actual Muslim citizens might approach it. Instead, he directs his inquiry to a different sort of interlocutor, one he creates from the thin air and describes as "the ideal-typical Muslim." The problem in the approach is immediate and obvious: it hardly harmonizes with March's ultimate goal of finding potential grounds for consensus. This is because orthodoxy is determined by the community, and thus attention must be paid, in the end, not to "ideal-typical Muslims" but rather to real ones, from Representative Keith Ellison to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, and to the respective Muslim sub communities within which they, and countless others like them, play important roles

Identitarian Violence and Identitarian Politics: Elections and Governance in Iraq

This Essay, originally published in a 2010 issue of the Harvard International Law Journal (Online), maintains that it is a mistake to ask whether or not the United States was wise to have "allowed" elections in Iraq as early as it did following its overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003. Such a question presumes an absence of domestic agency that was certainly not the case in Iraq, and is probably not the case in any modern society under occupation. Domestic demands coming from domestic forces seeking to shore up their own power base almost necessitated the outcome of relatively early elections in Iraq, irrespective of what any occupying power would have wanted. Put more directly, Shi'i religious elites aware of their demographic advantage were far more concerned about a Sunni dominated Ba'ath resurgence during an initial period of uncertainty and instability than they were about complying with the wishes of a foreign occupying power whose time in Iraq was destined to be relatively short. Elections were a convenient, and normatively appealing, means for the Shi'a to assume political power in a decisive and legitimating fashion. This in the end proved irresistible once the Shi'i clerical classes began calling for immediate transition to democratic rule. The Essay thus seeks to answer a different question; namely, whether, given domestic pressures, there is any way to limit civil conflict arising from locally demanded near term elections that are likely to prove destabilizing, as indeed they were in Iraq

The Arabs in the (Inter)National

This essay is a commentary on an article submitted by Professor Lama Abu-Odeh as part of a special symposium edition contained in Volume 10 of the Santa Clara Journal of International Law. In her piece, Professor Abu-Odeh builds on her earlier work respecting Islamic law but adds a new target to her sites, that of the study of national security. That is, we already knew Professor Abu-Odeh’s view of the typical Islamic law scholar. He is one who is focused either on the resurrection of the shari’a in some sort of reconstructed form or involved in a thoroughly misguided search for the truly “Islamic” in our contemporary, messy, hybrid and multipolar world, often disappointed when he cannot find it. In this work, Professor Abu-Odeh informs us that the national security scholar is guilty of something of the same, by ignoring “Muslims as agents of modern history” in considering what national security is supposed to be about. \ud \ud I can only applaud Professor Abu-Odeh’s focus on the notion of Muslims as agents of their own history. Like her, I find much that is wrong with what passes for national security discussions in our times. My concerns relate to the specific prescription she employs to deal with the problems of national security she outlines above. These relate to the establishment of a single Arab state that is the home of all the Arab peoples. I wonder whether, in advocating such a solution, a contradiction in her work might well be unearthed. It is one thing, after all, to call for changes in regimes or in economic governance in states which seem to have broadly disaffected citizens. It is quite another to call for an obliteration of those states entirely and a return to promises of an ethnically defined nation made by the United Kingdom nearly a century ago. Might we accuse Professor Abu-Odeh, that is, of doing vis-a-vis the Arab what she has deftly and with much justification decried in the study of the Islamic? Is she searching for the genuinely Arab as a “pearl in the shell”? Is she taking account of Arabs as agents of their own history, a history which has developed to no small extent since the end of the First World War, when the dream of the Arab state was thwarted? \ud \ud Is the resurrection of a single Arab state therefore almost as anachronistic an exercise as attempting the resurrection of Islamic law “in this or that field”? These questions are worth exploring, and this essay endeavors to address them

“Lone Wolf” Terrorism and the Classical Jihad: On the Contingencies of Violent Islamic Extremism

It is nearly impossible to describe Muslim expansionism in the centuries following the death of the Prophet Muhammad - broadly undertaken in service of the Islamic doctrine of jihad - as being somehow compatible with modern norms of international relations, including self-determination and noninterference in the affairs of other states. To detractors, this seems to suggest a certain tension in modern Muslim thought that jihadist movements have been able to exploit. Modern Muslim intellectuals, that is, are forced to somehow reconcile an expansionist past, which was not only tolerated by early jurists interpreting Islam’s sacred texts but indeed exhorted by them as a duty of the Muslim community, with modern realities, where the jihad as it was historically understood has become something of an embarrassment. In so doing, the argument runs, they leave themselves exposed to the “literalist” claims of the jihadists, who can call up such sources at will and demonstrate the true Islamicity of their actions relative to modernists who can only rely on abstract principles and vague apologies that sound suspiciously Western.\ud \ud The purpose of this paper is to explore the fallacy of this conclusion through the examination of “lone wolf” terrorism. This form of terrorism is quite relevant not only because of its inherent danger, but also because the methods of the lone wolf terrorist have been broadly accepted by a panoply of the most extreme Islamist organizations, very much including the so called Islamic State. I will show that even if early and medieval Muslim jurists hardly incorporated a worldview that rested on principles of mutual tolerance and respect toward other states and other religions, they nonetheless regarded the jihad as a fundamentally conservative doctrine, meant to preserve the Muslim state as it was and direct violence exclusively in external directions, in an organized and systematic attempt to expand what was known as the House of Islam into the universal Muslim state. The notion of lone wolf terrorism - individually directed and organized violence, executed beyond the meaningful control of the caliph - was entirely foreign. Moreover, it depends on deliberate violation of one of classical Islam's core concepts in international relations, that of respect for the terms of a covenant of security, or aman, when granted by a non-Muslim power to a Muslim or the reverse