Looking to the Future of Islamic Finance: Some Personal Opinions

This paper considers four recent developments in Islamic finance. These are: (1) increased recognition within the conventional finance community of the legitimacy and sustainability of Islamic finance; (2) increased recognition within the Islamic finance community that cooperation with the conventional community and conventional finance is both appropriate and acceptable; (3) an increased focus on the objectives (maqasid, broadly defined) of Islamic finance and how the practice of Islamic finance might be nudged in the direction of greater sensitivity to those objectives; and (4) a tentatively expanding willingness to objectively reconsider some oft-repeated, and rather dogmatic, assertions that have guided the development of Islamic finance.