Islamic Finance in a Global Context: Opportunities and Challenges

Despite this scope and imprint on the global economy, Islamic finance remains poorly understood at both the theoretical and practical level. Moreover, despite a number of recent optimistic trends, Islamic finance faces several ideological and structural challenges to full integration in the globalized economy. This Article aims to illuminate these challenges and provide a general overview of contemporary Islamic financial theories and practices. The first section concentrates on the size of the world\u27s Muslim population, the size of Muslim economies, and concepts of Islamic finance itself. The second section examines Muslim beliefs related to contemporary corporate finance. The third section looks at the challenges of Islamic finance. Security issues in Islamic finance, with a particular focus on the financial theories of the radical Salafi movement, are an important development and need to be understood clearly in terms of the challenges facing Muslim financial instruments and law. Specifically, we examine the fundamental paradox of the Salafi\u27s particular interpretation of Islamic finance. While Salafi-jihadist writings impose a sort of economic apartheid between Muslims and non-Muslims, their calls for economic jihad against the West (divestiture and boycott) try to exploit the very same interdependence and forces of globalization they decry

The precarious ally : Bahrain's impasse and U.S. policy

Frederic Wehre

Ending Libya’s civil war : reconciling politics, rebuilding security

Frederic Wehre

The forgotten uprising in Eastern Saudi Arabia

Frederic Wehre

The struggle for security in eastern Libya

Frederic Wehre

Syria’s sectarian ripples across the Gulf

Frederic Wehre

The politics of sectarianism in the Gulf : Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait, 2003-2011

This thesis explores Shi’a-Sunni relations in Gulf politics during a period of regional upheaval, starting with the 2003 invasion of Iraq through the Arab revolts of early 2011. It seeks to understand the conditions under which sectarian distinctions become a prominent feature of the Gulf political landscape, focusing on the three Gulf countries that have been affected most by sectarian tensions: Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait. The study analyzes the contagion effect of the civil war in Iraq, the 2006 war in Lebanon, and the Arab Spring on local sectarian dynamics in the three states. Specifically, it explores the role of domestic institutions—parliaments and other quasi-democratic structures, the media, and clerical establishments—in tempering or exacerbating sectarianism. It finds that the maturity and strength of participatory institutions in each state played a determinant role in the level of sectarianism resulting from dramatic shifts in the regional environment since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. I conclude, therefore, that the real roots of the so-called “rise of the Shi’a” phenomena lie in the domestic political context of each state, rather than in the regional policies of Iran or the contagion effect of events in Iraq or Lebanon. Although the Gulf Shi’a took a degree of inspiration from the actions of their co-religionists in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon, they ultimately strove for greater rights in a non-sectarian, nationalist framework. The rise of sectarianism in the Gulf has been largely the product of excessive alarm by entrenched Sunni elites or the result of calculated attempts by regimes to discredit Shi’a political actors by portraying them as proxies for Iran, Iraq, or the Lebanese Hizballah. What is qualitatively different about the post-2003 period is not the level of mobilization by the Shi’a, but rather the intensity of threat perception by Gulf regimes and Sunni Islamists.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo