Shabbir Akhtar

1

The past two centuries have, notwithstanding religious revivals world-wide, witnessed the largest eclipse, for size and intensity, in the religious consciousness of humankind in recorded history. Christianity, especially in its Protestant version, has been engulfed in its darkest reaches. The crisis of historical Christianity in its dogmatic detail has been acute and dramatic: many Christians are anxious about the future of its western incarnation. (The largest Christian communities today are outside the geographic West – in Africa and South America.) Though its epicentre remains in the Christian heartland of Europe, the secular condition is widespread. In this essay, we obliquely investigated the rationality of Islam, Christianity’s most ancient and formidable rival. Islamic belief has been judged by criteria alien to Islamic culture, history and civilization. The ubiquity of the West’s secular heritage ensures that all faiths face the tribunal of western secular reason emancipated from Christian-influenced strictures. We can only understand the Muslim confrontation with the modern world by understanding the consequences of the Christian capitulation to secularism, a concession that made western Christianity rhetorically religious but operationally secular.

Muhammad Anas Zarqa*

Projects that do not generate explicit income cannot be possibly financed on a profit-sharing basis. A suitable interest-free alternative method of financing is presented here, based on istisna‘ sale contract (commissioned or pre-ordered productio). Various aspects of using istisna‘ as a financing tool for infrastructural projects are discussed, including: (a) the illiquidity of the resulting financial claims and its implications, (b) suitability for financial intermediaries, and (c) the possibility of indexation of the resulting financial claims and their use as a monetary policy tool.