Undoubtedly, the emergence of cryptocurrencies has imposed the challenge of addressing their Shariah issues. These issues include the very permissibility of their issuance in view of the fact that they are not backed by real valuable assets or supervised by financial authorities, which makes their holders vulnerable to possible fraud and manipulative fluctuations in their values.
Financial intermediation is the core of the banking business, as its role is to mediate between the owners of surplus funds and those in need of finance, sharing the generated profit with the funds' owners. However, financial intermediation does involve some economic risks in terms of concentration of debt in financial institutions and the possibility of the inability of financed clients to repay their debts. When this happens, financial crises are inevitable, as it occurred in 2008.
The aim of this chapter is to compare Islamic Sharī’a law with international policies governing cultural heritage preservation, and to investigate current, related laws in Qatar as a case study for the Middle Eastern region. The author presents research carried out within the Materiality and Preservation in Islamic Contexts project, in which he examined governing models of cultural heritage preservation by reviewing Islamic classical literature and by analysing Qatar’s Law on Antiquities according to six criteria of policy efficiency described by Daniel Mazmanian and Paul Sabatier (1983).