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This study is primarily concerned with the theory of Islamic banking and its practice in Bangladesh, and shari’ah and its four sources forming the basis of Islamic banking are discussed at length. The research seeks to: analyse the theoretical foundations of Islamic baking and practice in Bangladesh; examine areas of similarity and differences between the structure and practices of Islamic banking and conventional banks; and identify the problems, challenges and prospects of Islamic banking in Bangladesh. The dissertation examines primary and secondary sources and draws on fieldwork in Bangladesh and the author’s personal experiences. The study undertaken shows that over the years there has been an expansion of Islamic banking in Bangladesh. Islamic banks are competing successfully with their conventional counterparts in an environment where rules, regulations and regulatory bodies are designed to facilitate banking based on interest. At the same time it has become apparent that the profit and loss sharing framework, which is one of the cardinal principles of Islamic banking, has yet to take deep root. The current profitability of Islamic banks is often maintained by products and services, which on closer analysis resemble broadly the products of conventional banking. It is thus suggested that more in depth research should be undertaken by Islamic bankers and scholars to study products and services of conventional banking with a view to adapting them successfully to the tenets of shari’ah. / Master of Laws (Hons)

This Masters thesis examines the process of the Islamisation of Bosnia from the eighth century to the end of the fifteenth century. This era of early Islamic influence has not previously been systematically studied, and remains an area little understood by many medievalists. The major foci of the analysis are the pre-Ottoman era and early Ottoman periods. This thesis raises the following research questions: When and how did the first Islamisation of the Balkan Slavs (including Bosnians) occur? How did Islam influence Bosnian society and culture, and where were the Bosnian Muslim settlements established? This thesis includes a detailed historical investigation that makes use of a range of bibliographic materials. These consist of fragmentary works, archival and administrative documents and other relevant factography collected from a research field trip to Bosnia between June 27 and July 24, 2003. The main findings reveal the complexity of this culturo-religious process in terms of both the early Islamic influence and contemporary cultural diversity. While different theoretical approaches to cultural representation and social space assist in exploring the hybrid nature of Bosniak identity, the primary and secondary data analyses highlight the significance of the phenomenon of the early Islamisation of Bosnia

The Republic of Tatarstan, a Muslim-majority region of the Russian Federation, is home to a post-Soviet Islamic revival now entering its third decade. Throughout the 1990s, the Tatars of Tatarstan were recognized as practicing a liberal form of Islam, reported more as an attribute of ethno-national culture than as a code of religious conduct. In recent years, however, the republic's reputation as a bastion of religious liberalism has been challenged, first, by a counter-revival of conservative Islamic traditions considered indigenous to the region and, second, by increasing evidence that Islamic fundamentalism, generally attributed in Russia to Wahhabism or Salafism, has taken hold and is growing in influence among the region's Muslims. / This dissertation explores how changing political-territorial circumstances are implicated in this transformation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, and a variety of qualitative research methods, including textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, and ethnographic study, the dissertation demonstrates that the transformation in Islamic identity relates to changing understandings of this region as a political space. An examination of practices and representations of the Muslim Spiritual Board of Tatarstan and conflicting perspectives on landscape elements in the Kazan Kremlin shows that the meaning of Islam is being driven by political-geographic change. / Analysis of these matters reveals that, as part of Tatarstan's quest for wide-ranging territorial autonomy in the 1990s, government-supported institutions cultivated a preferred understanding of Islam that corresponded to visions of the region as the Tatars' sovereign historic homeland. Over the past decade, amid a rapid recentralization of the federation, support has shifted to Islamic practices deemed "traditional to Russia" as part of a broader multinational Russian identity crafted to fit visions of the country as a powerful, unified state. Thus, the meaning of Islam in this particular place is mediated by competing visions of Tatarstan as a homeland.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Cornell University, May, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

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The concepts of sovereignty and legal personality in Islamic Law and Western Law are fundamentally different. Under Islamic law sovereignty belongs to Allah and the ruler is the agent of the Ummah. His function is to implement, rather than make the law. Western law assigns sovereignty to the state. The state has complete monopoly over the law making process, giving validity to which under Islamic law was the domain of the doctrinal schools. Furthermore, the birth of the nation-state has changed the structure in which traditional Islamic law operated which has now been forcefully restricted in its scope. The concept of ‘asabiyya is different from the concept of nation. The former is a natural phenomenon while the latter has been imposed upon the Ummah. If certain changes are made to the way that the modern state operates, it can function as an administrative tool that serves the Ummah.

The concepts of sovereignty and legal personality in Islamic Law and Western Law are fundamentally different. Under Islamic law sovereignty belongs to Allah and the ruler is the agent of the Ummah. His function is to implement, rather than make the law. Western law assigns sovereignty to the state. The state has complete monopoly over the law making process, giving validity to which under Islamic law was the domain of the doctrinal schools. Furthermore, the birth of the nation-state has changed the structure in which traditional Islamic law operated which has now been forcefully restricted in its scope. The concept of ‘asabiyya is different from the concept of nation. The former is a natural phenomenon while the latter has been imposed upon the Ummah. If certain changes are made to the way that the modern state operates, it can function as an administrative tool that serves the Ummah.

This thesis is an attempt to study the role of Ahmad Surkati in al-Ishrad movement in Java and its implications for the Arab community in Indonesia.

The current world population of Muslims is in the range of 1.2 to 1.6 billion (20% of the world¡¦s population), and their numbers are spread out over various geographical areas and religious groups. After the Cold War, America has experienced several international conflicts with the Islamic world at large. Huntington, an American scholar, wrote a thesis ¡§The Clash of Civilizations¡¨ to explain the cause of conflict. While there are significant culture differences, it is difficult to conclude that it is a simple case of conflict in culture. Upon closer inspection of the conflict situation, we find that the American dispute with the Islamic world has largely been focused on the Middle-Eastern group of countries. It would be dangerous to take a stand point that the basis of conflict is in terms of culture, because it over-simplifies the situation and leaves an undesirable stereotype on the Islamic civilization. Using a historical sociology perspective, the author found that there have been several different changes at different times in the international relationship between the American and Middle-Eastern Islamic countries after the Cold War. In fact, before the Cold War, Afghanistan was a crucial ally in the Anti-Soviet movement. It is therefore worth pondering why Afghanistan became the first Middle-Eastern country target in the war against terrorism. This thesis serves to use a geo-political perspective to further examine and explain the intricate transitions and changes in the American-Islamic relationship, in order to demonstrate that the conflict is a struggle for power, rather than a mere ¡§Clash of Civilizations¡¨ as in Huntington¡¦s paper.