Did Islamic Banks Benefit from the Financial Crisis of 2008? The Jordanian Case (2008 – 2014)

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008 has meant that the investors flight to safety, and the conventional banks have tighter lending patterns, this paper is trying to find out whether Islamic banks in Jordan have taken this opportunity and have grown more than their peers of conventional banks. To make an appropriate comparative study, a simple model has been developed to establish full coherence and consistency of selected variables to measure the growth rate for both Islamic and conventional banks, those variables are customers’ deposits, net credit facilities, total assets and shareholders’ equity covering the period of (2008-2014).Trend analysis and T-test were utilized to test out data. Although, the simple average shows higher growth rate related to all of our selected variables in Islamic banks against conventional banks, but statistically insignificant for all of the selected variables. Keywords: Islamic Banks, Financial Crisis, Growth Rate, Deposits, Credit Facilities, Equity, Assets