The finance of international trade in the Gulf Arab States: a comparative study between the conventional and Islamic banking systems with special emphasis on the United Arab Emirates (Ph.D. Thesis)

Although conventional banking has existed in the Gulf area since the 1920s, the Muslim population of this region has been reluctant to bank with these institutions because of their failure to conform to Islamic principles. With the discovery of oil in commercial quantities in the Gulf, additional commercial banks entered the region, and concurrently, a change in attitude occurred among the Muslims in the region toward conventional banks. This changing attitude underlies the Islamic renaissance toward the banking and finance system that occurred during the 1960s and 1970s. In Dubai, the first Islamic bank was established in 1975. As a result the Muslim community was galvanized and two competitive banking systems, conventional versus Islamic, came into being. The thrust of work is the evaluation of relevant shari`a principles, hadith and fatawa, gaps in these laws, and empirical material based on a sampling and interviews. The authors argue that an Islamic banking system is prefer