The Development of Islamic Finance: Reflecting the Achievement and Direction

The impressive development of Islamic finance in the last three decades does not only attract wide attention from the people of the world, at the same time, it also pinned a hope that Islamic finance could offer a solid alternative and solution to the world crisis and the uncertain proposals for solving it. A coherent perspective for understanding real economic and financial problems as well as a viable alternative to the good financial practices to actualise human prosperity is avidly awaited. It is expected that Islamic finance will continuously evolve into a more sophisticated form and structure in the next decade. Nevertheless, in this journey the concern on whether the development is moving on the right track to realise the hopes pinned on it at the time of its initial establishment still remain. The paper attempts to understand the raison d’etre of Islamic finance emergence, the approach taken in developing the industry and its future development. We argue that Islamic finance, i