Abstract

About forty years ago, with the establishment in 1975 of the Islamic Development Bank in Jeddah, the new Islamic approach to banking operations took its first steps outside the Muslim world. From the 1980s and early 1990s, in particular, mainly as a consequence of the enormous increase in oil prices, along with the consciousness of a common religious and cultural identity, Islamic banking and finance has grown stronger and consolidated, becoming able to compete worldwide with conventional systems through “shari‘a compliant” operations. ¹