Innovations in Islamic Philanthropy and Monetization of Islamic Philanthropic Instruments

The world today is plagued by hunger, epidemics, global warming, and human rights violations. While several Western civil organizations are actively dealing with these challenges, Muslims have yet to be identified as global partners associated with peace building. To meet these challenges and to bring the world’s poor out of poverty; we find a strong demand for carefully monetized Islamic philanthropic instruments. This paper will discuss the introduction of specifically designed Islamic philanthropic instruments for the two major sectors of Islamic endowments, zakat and waqf. It will elaborate on the manner in which we can use specialized financial institutions to deal with long-mismanaged charitable funds, introduce new scopes for participation in charities, enhance opportunities for participation, provide efficient and improved management of endowments, ensure selective investments to maximize the socio-economic benefit, and most importantly, invest funds for productive usage as opp