The social construction of Sharīʿa: bank interest, home purchase, and islamic norms in the west: Bank interest, home purchase, and islamic norms in the west

According to the late Rashid Rida, riba (usury) is the fuqaha's equivalent to the theologian debate on predestination: it gives rise to endless and controversial debates. In the modern world, economic transactions are not surprisingly one of the most problematic issues for Islamic jurisprudence. The prohibition of bank interest, under- stood as riba, makes many financial operations very doubtful from an Islamic point of view. The issue has become not only a question of fiqh, but also more largely a question of identity: "either Muslims keep the authenticity of their religion [by insisting on the prohibition of interest], or they deform it like the Jews and Christians"'. In apologetic literature, the concept of Islamic banking, and more generally of an Islamic economy, is promoted as a viable alternative to both capitalism and communism. Three different approaches to this question have been identified: the idealist, the pragmatic, and the liberal or maslaha-oriented2. The latter emphasises that today's bank interest does not correspond to the pre-Islamic riba and is not inherently evil. On the other end of the spectrum, the idealist approach restricts Islamic banking to the contracts all Islamic Law and considers bank interest a grave sin. view, which predominates in Islamic banking, oscillates between these two poles: while it sees bank interest as forbidden, it seeks to circumvent it in innovative and sometimes unorthodox ways. Conventional Muslim scholars ('ulama') lay between the idealists (the majority) and the pragmatists.