Introduction—transactional Islamic finance

There are a number of different opinions and principles iterated by Shari’ah board members when interpreting Shari’ah law in commercial situations thus resulting in what would appear to be discrepancies in the use of legal documentation within Islamic finance transactions.

In response to these recognised market inconsistencies, there has been greater global focus upon the development of national centralised regulatory authorities on matters of Islamic finance. For example, in 2017 following the national sanction of an Islamic finance industry, the Moroccan Shari’ah Committee for Participative Finance was established by royal decree as a body of 10 Islamic scholars and financial experts to oversee and regulate the newly established financial sector. The Central Bank of Bahrain (the CBB) which has regulated the Bahrain financial sector since 2002, has similarly followed this developing regulatory trend by releasing an announcement in September 2017 to the effect that all banking reports (traditionally approved by in-house Islamic scholars) are to be subject to external audit, plus from June 2018 new rules were introduced to further unify the role