The first Muslims arrived in the American colonies and later in the United States as African slaves. Although a few and noteworthy Muslim American slaves left written records of their lives, Islam was largely extinguished by the white slave owners. Sectarian and racial forms of Islam were introduced into the United States, particularly within urban African American communities, by Ahmadiyya missionaries and the Moorish Science Temple. The rise of the Nation of Islam under Wali Fard Muhammad and Elijah Muhammad and its bifurcation under the latter’s son, Warith Deen Mohammed, and Louis Farrakhan deserve special attention, as do the initial appeal of the Nation of Islam’s racial formulation of Islam and, decades later, the willingness of most of its members to move to Sunni orthodoxy after Elijah Muhammad’s death. The second major, though not entirely separate, strand of Islam in the United States, though often interacting or competing with the first, comes from Muslim immigrants. This group brings unique issues, such as living in a largely Christian society, competing with the Nation of Islam, refuting stereotypes in the media and popular culture, finding a political voice, and coping with post-9/11 Islamophobia, all leading to the consideration of the prospects for a uniquely “American Islam” that reflects U.S. pluralism and (supposed) separation of “church and state.”
Article
Stephan Procházka
The ʿAlawis are adherents of an Islamic sect, the origin of which can be traced back to 9th-century Iraq. They are an offshoot of early Shiah Islam with ancient Iranian, Christian, and Gnostic influences. Outsiders often call them “Nusayri,” after the sect’s founder Ibn Nusayr. Practically all ʿAlawis are Arabs. Their total number is about four million, among which some 2.5 million reside in Syria, where they constitute roughly 12 percent of the population. Many ʿAlawi beliefs and rites are still kept secret by the community, being revealed only to initiate male members. One key element in their faith is the belief in a divine triad that has manifested itself to the ʿAlawi community in seven cycles. Other characteristics are an extraordinary veneration for Muhammad’s son-in-law ʿAli, the belief in the transmigration of the soul, and a very large number of holy shrines, which are frequent in all regions settled by ʿAlawis. Because of the esoteric nature of the ʿAlawi religion and the scarcity of authentic written sources, many details of their creed are subjects of vigorous public and scholarly discussion.
For many centuries, the ʿAlawis were an economically weak, socially marginalized, and persecuted group whose heartland was western Syria. The public rise of the community began with the establishment of the French mandate over Syria after World War I and reached its zenith when the ʿAlawi Hafiz al-Assad became president of Syria in 1971. Since then, the disproportionate political and economic influence of the ʿAlawis in Syria has fueled confessional conflicts with the Sunni majority, which culminated in the civil war that began in 2011.
Article
Gisela Procházka-Eisl
The Alevis are a religious community on the periphery of Shia Islam. The name “Alevi” means “Adherents of ʿAli,” alluding to Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin ʿAli ibn Abi Talib, who enjoys extraordinary veneration among Alevis. Alevism was developed in Central Anatolia during the 13th century by itinerant Muslim mystics. It includes elements of pre-Islamic Turkish shamanism and aspects of mainstream Shia Islam, which influenced it through cultural contacts with Safavid Iran. Alevism never was a unified and homogeneous community but has always had a variety of sub-groups. For centuries Alevis practiced their rites in secret, which created suspicion and rumor among Sunnite Muslims. Today’s Alevis still have to struggle with this distrust, and are often regarded as heretics by the Sunnites. The designation “Alevi” came into use in the early 20th century as a collective term for a number of religious groups such as Bektaşi, Tahtacı, and Abdal, and today is used instead of the former, pejorative term Kızılbaş (“Red-Heads”). The Alevis are the largest religious minority group in the Republic of Turkey, where their estimated number is around 15 million. Large Alevi groups also reside in the Balkan states as well as in Central and Western Europe, particularly Germany and Austria. Roughly two-thirds of the Alevis are Turkish speakers. The other third speak Kurdish and Zazaki.
In the 1980s, the community underwent the so-called “Alevi revival,” a process of exposure and openness that can be partly explained as a reaction against the re-Islamization of Turkish society. Today Alevis perform their rites and express their beliefs openly.
Although they share certain features with them, the Alevis should not be confused with the Alawis (Nusayris), who live in southern Turkey and Syria and who are all Arabic speakers.
Article
Samah Selina Choudhury
That Muslims are both consumers and practitioners of comedy may run counter to the otherwise ubiquitous notion that Islam, seemingly above all other religious traditions, is devoid of humor. Yet comedy, especially its staged performance version known as stand-up, is an occupation readily taken up by a number of Muslim comedians during the 21st century in North America. Muslim comedians are also South Asian comedians, Arab comedians, Iranian comedians, or Black comedians, among others, and the naming of their comedy explicitly as “Muslim” can be traced to how openly they speak of their common experiences of being subject to anti-Muslim hostility as a racialized act of violence. This racialization of Islam relies on “looking” Muslim: phenotypic features like dark hair, skin, and beards that simultaneously sweep up others that may share these attributes and make them targets of institutional and interpersonal violences. This common refrain can be seen especially in the material of comedians from the Allah Made Me Funny and Axis of Evil tours during the early 2000s, while later comedians like Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Kumail Nanjiani describe similar experiences in added terms of a racialized solidarity with other minoritized communities of color in the United States. These later comedians of the 2010s and their brand of politically oriented comedy have been upheld by dominant arts industries as examples of American multiculturalism and diversity, coinciding with the large-scale and cross-sectional social justice efforts to support undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement. Far from being a mark of their non-belonging in North American society, this racialized association with Islam is platformed as emblematic of North American societies: their exceptional openness and unparalleled freedoms. At the same time, however, women and Black Muslim comedians are rarely bestowed a similar entrée of visibility as “Muslim” comedians due to the hegemonic racialized image of Muslims as terrifying “terrorists”—a distorted privilege accessible usually only to male comedians of South Asian or Middle Eastern heritage.
Article
Walter C. Rucker
The Black Atlantic and the African Diaspora refer to overlapping geographic and historical concepts each representing a complex series of dispersals, connections and reconnections, interactions, engagements and disengagements, and conflicts. As a geographic, spatial, and historical subset of the African Diaspora, the Black Atlantic refers to the sustained contacts and connections among the peoples of Atlantic Africa, Europe, and the Americas beginning with the “Age of Reconnaissance” (1306–1484) and the “Age of Contact” (1482–1621) and extending into the present. One of the first acts in the creation of the Black Atlantic can be located within the story of Mansa Qu, Islamic emperor and explorer from the western Sudanic empire of Mali, who commissioned two oceanic voyages to discover the western extent of the Atlantic between 1307 and 1311. Reconnaissance expeditions of this sort, launched by both Atlantic Africans and later by Iberians in the 14th and 15th centuries, helped create knowledge networks and webs of interconnections that would become critical to the later formation of the Black Atlantic.
At the core of many of these earlier efforts to explore the world around them were the religious pursuits and goals—both Christian and Islamic—on the part of Atlantic Africans and Iberians. Delegations of Christian monks and pilgrims from Ethiopia visited the Italian peninsula, Iberia, and other parts of Europe beginning in 1306 seeking pan-Christian alliances against common Muslim foes. These early delegations fueled later Iberian imaginations about the existence of Prester John—an eastern defender of Christendom believed by the early 15th century to preside over an East African kingdom. In part, the protracted search for the mythical Prester John in Africa by the Portuguese after 1415 set in motion sustained contacts between Iberia and Atlantic Africa highlighted by the creation of Iberian-African settlements along the Atlantic African coast and in the Atlantic Islands, the transfer of enslaved labor to the Americas via the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the beginnings of sugar plantations and slave societies in the Caribbean and Brazil by the mid-16th century. Centuries of sustained contact of this nature spawned a range of cultural formations, the processes of ethnogenesis, and the creation of new transnational identities in the littoral regions and beyond of the four continents that frame the Atlantic Ocean.
Creolization, the unique confluence of Atlantic cultures, served as the foundation for reinvented peoples across the Western Hemisphere who remembered, activated, and re-created “Africa” while attending to New World realities of racial slavery and hierarchy. This process of creolization created a range of ethnocultural permutations, from Atlantic Creoles to a wide array of neo-African ethnic groups in the Americas (e.g., Eboes, Coromantees, Congos, Nâgos, and Lucumís). Within this diverse cultural matrix and the processes of cultural mixing, religious and spiritual worldviews were among the most significant articulations of Black Atlantic and creole cultures. Indeed, there is no other way to decode the intricacies of Cuban Santería, Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Voudou, New Orleans Hoodoo, Jamaican Myalism, or Obeah without framing them in the context of the cultural negotiations among many Atlantic African peoples made necessary by the suffocating confines of racial slavery and more recent socio-racial hierarchies embedded within Western Hemisphere colonialism, Jim Crow in the United States, and other manifestations of white supremacy
Article
Carool Kersten
The caliphate as an institution for governing the Muslim community can be traced back to the time immediately after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 ce. With its humble origins in the parochial settings of an Arabian desert oasis, the caliphate provided the structure for the shepherding of a community of believers organized around prophetic teachings calling for return to the true religion of Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other prophets, a religion that came to be known as Islam. Despite internal dissent and even civil war, the caliphate not only survived but even expanded far beyond the Arabian Peninsula. Between the 8th and 10th centuries the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates ruled an empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indus River. After that, the challenges of sustained political control proved too formidable to be exercised from a single center, leading to political fragmentation.
Although it functioned only for a few centuries as an effective form of Islamic governance, for many Sunni Muslims the caliphate’s political and symbolic significance has outlasted its administrative and institutional fragmentation. Its appeal even continued after its formal abolition in 1924 by the founding president of the Turkish Republic, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881–1938). Since then the caliphate has not just remained a nostalgic memory. Throughout the 20th century and into the new millennium, some proponents of political Islam continue to advocate the restoration of a caliphate as a rallying point for Muslims worldwide, in some instances making concrete efforts toward re-establishing the institution or even proclaiming a new caliph.
Article
Christie S. Warren
The Constitution of Madinah, written by the Prophet after his flight from Mecca and arrival in Madinah (622 ce/1 ah), is considered by many to be the first written constitution. Nevertheless, and although Islamic law has developed in rich detail since then in a number of other areas, constitutionalism remains a comparatively underdeveloped area of Islamic law. Only recently has this started to change.
Since 2011 and in part due to events of the so-called Arab Spring, the topic of Islam and constitutions has been the subject of heightened interest. In recent years, a number of Muslim-majority countries, including Tunisia, Algeria, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, and Palestine, have embarked upon constitutional processes, and the relationship between Islam and the state has been debated in each of them. A variety of models has emerged over time; whereas in Saudi Arabia the Qur’an serves as the constitution itself, in Egypt Shari’ah is the principal source of legislation. Similarly, while the 2012 draft constitution of Libya states that Islam shall be the state religion and Islamic Shari’ah the main source of legislation, the constitution of Iraq provides that no law contradicting established provisions of Islam may be enacted. Language in the Afghan constitution is even more precise and states that Afghanistan is an Islamic republic, that no law shall contravene the tenets and provisions of Islam, and that in the absence of specific constitutional or legislative language governing the disposition of a case, courts shall implement principles of Hanafi jurisprudence.
In similar fashion, academic scholarship analyzing the relationship between Islam and constitutionalism has increased in scope and vibrancy in recent years. Historically, scholarship in this field tended to focus on issues relating to governance and administrative structures in Muslim-majority countries—not on normative constitutional principles. More recently, Islamic perspectives on constitutional norms have become the focus of significant scholarship. Some constitutional issues of recent academic interest include state sponsorship of a particular religion to the exclusion of others, freedom to practice Islam and other religions, and options for articulating the role of Shari’ah within constitutional frameworks, including the use of supremacy and repugnancy clauses, the role of Shari’ah as a source of legislation, “Shari’ah checks” to ensure that legislation does not contravene Islamic law, review by Shura Councils, and the role of the judicial branch in interpreting Islamic law. Additional constitutional issues impacted by defined relationships between Shari’ah and the state include human and women’s rights, protection of religious minorities; criminal law and hudud punishments; finance law and restrictions on charging interest; rights of freedom of association, expression, and expression; and provisions governing marriage, divorce and inheritance.
Article
Vincent F. Biondo III
The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) is the premier civil rights organization for Muslims in the United States. Founded in Washington, DC, in 1994 with an emphasis on public relations and media communications, over two decades it has expanded to about two hundred employees at thirty-two offices in major US cities in nineteen states, according to its official website. The organization emphasizes that it is structured so that these offices operate independently. In addition to tracking hate crimes, these offices provide or arrange for legal services in areas such as civil rights, immigration, and homeland security. The story of the organization’s growth and success reveals key issues for American Muslim involvement in politics, including those surrounding the First Amendment and the intersection of religion and race. In 2016, the National Board named its first female Chair, Roula Allouch, a lawyer from Cincinnati, who in the University of Kentucky’s Law School alumni magazine was described as “the only Muslim in her class,” and a person who “knows how to put people at ease . . . to break down misconceptions [and] seek peace.” The CAIR Board has become more diverse and representative since its founding and has ventured into defending non-Muslims from civil rights violations.
Today CAIR describes its mission on its national website and in many state office annual reports as follows: “To enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” While it is primarily a civil rights organization, since its founding the organization’s leaders have found it necessary to counter misinformation by introducing educational information about Islam. Key civil rights efforts it has engaged in include support for thousands of immigration and religious discrimination cases every year, documenting hate crimes in annual reports, and challenging anti-shari’ah legislation. CAIR further leads educational efforts by coordinating diversity training sessions, a public library project, and media appearances.
Article
Rosemary Hancock
Starting in the late 1960s, a small number of Muslim scholars turned their attention to how the Islamic scriptures and intellectual tradition might help Muslims understand and respond to climate change and environmental crisis. In building this Islamic approach to ecology, these scholars undertook close analysis of the Qur’an, the Sunnah (the collected traditions of the Prophet Muhammad), centuries of Islamic law, and the writings of Sufi mystics and scholars in order to construct Islamic environmental theologies and law. This Islamic ecology remained on the margins of mainstream Islamic discourse for decades, but the participation of Muslims in environmental movements is growing and with it, the need for an Islamic ecology. In developing environmental theologies, Muslim scholars focus upon the relationship of God to the natural world, positing that as God’s creation, the natural world is a sign through which humanity can experience God. Although the natural world is “made useful” to humanity, humans do not have absolute dominion over creation. Rather, humanity is Khalifah—God’s representative or steward on earth. The development of Islamic environmental law from within the shari’ah tradition is arguably just as—if not more—important as articulating an Islamic environmental theology. Some Muslim environmentalists argue for the revival of Islamic land management institutions and look to the many regulations regarding agriculture and water management found in shari’ah as avenues for implementing Islamic environmental law.
Article
Nelly Lahoud
Political Islam has generated two ideological strands that use religious ideology to advance their goals, namely, Islamism and jihadism. On the one hand, Islamists have formulated a political paradigm premised on Islamic teachings that are adaptable to the secular framework of the modern state and have, therefore, endured both as domestic and global political actors. On the other hand, jihadis have rejected positive law outright and advanced a global revolutionary paradigm against today’s secular world order. Key to jihadism’s appropriation of Islamic teachings is a quest for a legal code that provides jihadis with both an anti-establishment justification for their violence and a claim to legitimacy in the minds of Muslims whom they wish to enlist as their followers.
Article
Ovamir Anjum
Governance in Islamic history has taken many different forms. The formative period saw most innovative deployment of the Arab tribal norms under the guidance of Islamic norms and the pressure of the rapid expansion. After the conquests, the ruling elite augmented their Arab tribal form of governance with numerous institutions and practices from the surrounding empires, particularly the Persian empire. The Umayyads ruled as Arab chiefs, whereas the Abbasids ruled as Persian emperors. Local influences further asserted themselves in governance after the Abbasids weakened and as Islamization took root. After the fragmentation of the Abbasid empire by the ah 4th century/10th century ce, a distinctively Islamic society emerged whose regional rulers upheld its law and institutions such as land-grants (iqṭāʿ), taxation (kharāj and jizya), education (legal madhhab, jāmiʿ and madrasah), and judiciary (qaḍāh). A triangle of governmental authority was established, with the caliph as the source of legitimacy, symbol of community unity, and leader of religious rites; the sultan as the territorial king who maintained the army and monopoly over violence; and the scholars (ulama’) as socioreligious leaders of their respective communities. The caliph or the sultan appointed the local qāḍīs from among the ulama’, who served not only as judges and mediators but also as moral guides and administers of endowments and jurisconsults and counselors, and thus played a key role in the self-governance of classical Islamic societies.
Article
Mikeal C. Parsons
Most religious traditions venerate a certain corpus of writings as authoritative for the beliefs, practices, doctrine, and ethics of that community. Often that corpus is a closed canon of sacred texts collected in one document that may be accompanied by traditions of interpretive strategies, which in turn may be formal and written, ad hoc and oral, or some combination of the two. Reverence for those writings often manifested itself in the care of and attention to the ongoing production of those texts. Illustrations, illuminations, or decorative designs frequently accompanied the reproduction of the text, further revealing the devotion to and reverence for the community’s holy book. Judaism and Christianity are two such religious traditions, and their adherents are often called “people of the Book.” Manuscripts (in particular illuminated ones) played a crucial role in establishing and sustaining the religious authority of the Bibles of Judaism and, especially, of Christianity.
Article
Brooke Sherrard
Americans have utilized Islam as a rhetorical device for articulating various understandings of American identity from the time of the earliest Anglo-American settlers. In every period, many rejected Islam and Muslims as oppositional to American identity, accusing Islam of inherent despotism that conflicted with American liberty. Others, though, used perceived traits of Islam to critique American behaviors or focused on similarities between Islam and Christianity. Many citizens of the early American republic assumed their country was essentially Protestant, but founding figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison indicated their support for a more inclusive polity by listing Muslims among the varieties of people they believed could be good citizens. These men meant this abstractly, as they believed there were no Muslims in the United States at the time and did not know some African slaves were Muslim.
American Protestant organizations sent missionaries around the world starting in the early 19th century, including to areas of the Middle East where the Muslim majority was legally protected from proselytization. Therefore, missionaries tended to work with native Christian populations. American missionaries, travelers, and explorers had a great interest in the Holy Land. A frequent theme in their writings was a desire to see this area reclaimed from Islamic rule. They believed the Holy Land could be regenerated through Protestant influence and often suggested Jews could be relocated there. Over time, liberal Protestants moved away from seeking conversions and became more interested in educational and medical aspects of missions. American discussions about Islam intensified again after September 11, 2001. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis argued that Western civilization and Islamic civilization were inherently incompatible. Others, like John L. Esposito and Feisal Abdul Rauf, focused on the historical and theological similarities between Christianity and Islam to suggest common ground.
Article
Rachel Milstein
The history of figurative painting in Islamic lands, although limited to certain regions and periods, includes a meaningful variety of saintly iconographies, mostly as book illustrations. Produced from the turn of the 14th to the early 17th century in Iranian capital cities or in the Ottoman Empire, paintings of prophets illuminate manuscripts of universal histories, encyclopedias, didactic poetry, and anthologies of prophetic biographies (Stories of the Prophets). They depict personages, not necessarily prophets, from the Old and the New Testaments, two Arab prophets mentioned in the Qurʼan, and finally Muhammad (and ʿAli, although he was not a prophet). The acts of these figures served as moral and spiritual models for the individual believers and, no less so, for the desired behavior of Muslim rulers. In Iran, the message of the illustrated texts and their paintings shifts from historical to moral, and often to mystical. In the Ottoman Empire, in addition, the prophets were conceived as forefathers of the Ottoman dynasty. In Moghul India, only Solomon and Jesus were depicted, not very often, while Joseph’s story was quite popular in late Kashmir. The impact of Western iconography and style, which characterize the recurrence of Jesus’ image, is seen also in later Iran, where portrayals of Solomon, Joseph, and Jesus were painted mainly on decorative objects, such as pen boxes and book bindings.
Article
Siti Nurani Mohd. Noor
There are varying perspectives within Islam on bodily enhancement and modifications. Still, it is perhaps possible for bioethicists and scholars of Islam to agree that categorical prohibitions on bodily modifications may not work. The way to ethically address this issue is to ensure that good policies and governance are put in place to monitor the safety of the application of such innovations on the human body. The stark reality is that humanity in the early 21st century is poised to change at unprecedented speed with the advent of technological innovations, especially nanotechnology.
Article
The continuous institutionalization of Islamic bioethics is visible in both a growing amount of literature and an increasing number of experts and committees that deal with ethical and social questions in medicine and the life sciences. Muslim and non-Muslim practitioners in the field like to claim that the growing attention for these issues has already turned Islamic bioethics into a separate discipline. Islamic bioethical deliberations obviously form a conglomeration of different methodological and theoretical approaches, it seems also justified to see Islamic bioethics as a multidimensional inquiry cutting across different disciplines. From this viewpoint, the establishment of Islamic bioethics as an institutionalized field of practice, research, reflection, and teaching remains a continuing challenge.
Article
Nidhal Guessoum
What ethical issues that nanotechnology raise – in its present state of development and in future, projected breakthroughs? Are those ethical issues to be addressed from a utilitarian perspective (pros and cons to humans) or from higher principles, perhaps religious ones? Does Islam address those issues from a theological perspective or from juristic (“Fiqhi”, i.e. harmful/prohibited vs. beneficial/permissible) angle? What viewpoints and stands have ethicists and religious scholars (Muslim and other) advanced on nanotechnology?
Article
Anke Iman Bouzenita
Bioethical discourse in Western and Islamic societies needs to be viewed against the background of their different historical perspectives and the role secularism has played in their respective development. While the Islamic experience generally saw science and technology evolving out of the Islamic way of life with medical ethics embedded in, and not hindered by, the injunctions of Islamic law, the Western (European) experience emphasizes the a priori need for secularization so as to initiate scientific development. Secularism therefore seems ingrained in Western approaches to science. Against this background, Western bioethics tends to insist on a secular imprint on bioethics. Bioethicists in Muslim-majority countries and in Muslim-minority communities elsewhere work with different historical and cultural experiences. Islam and its sources are still considered to be an important reference framework in Muslim countries and among Muslim populations. The communication of bioethical standards to various recipients therefore requires Islamic justification for legitimacy and acceptance.
Article
Rodney Wilson
Justice in commercial transactions is central to Islamic economic teaching, in particular the notion that remuneration should be fair, with distribution viewed as a moral issue. Risks are inherent in any economic system, but in Islam rather than risks being borne by debtors alone, they should be shared by creditors. This has implications for the organization of banking and finance. The charging of interest is forbidden, partly due to concerns about exploitative usury, as well as unease about how interest rates are determined.
Islamic economic teaching stresses the merits of charitable giving and the importance of tackling poverty. At the same time there is an awareness of the dangers of creating a dependency culture and the desirability of sustainability in charitable giving. There is concern not only with how money is earned but with how it is spent, with Islamic economic teaching providing guidance on what spending is legitimate and desirable and what should be avoided.
Markets are viewed as the normal method of conducting business in Islamic economics, and private property rights are respected. Islamic teaching in the economic sphere is often regarded as more compatible with a capitalist economic system than a socialist economy, although there is no consensus among Islamic economists about where the dividing line between the state and the private sector lies. Arguably Islamic teaching has developed more at the microeconomic level of the firm while macroeconomic fiscal and monetary policy options remain contested.
Article
M. Kabir Hassan, Tahsin Huq, and Aishath Muneeza
Islamic finance is an alternative source of financing to the conventional financing that emerged via institutionalization in the 1960s. It has gained popularity in the world irrespective of faith convictions due to the universal and ethical principles adhered in the practice of it. In this regard, North America is not an exception. In the United States and Canada, Islamic finance has been adopted, and there is an established regulatory environment for the operation of it with political support. There is also a wide range of innovative Islamic finance products structured and used in this part of the world that is conducive to the demand of the population and regulatory environment of Islamic finance found in the respective jurisdictions. These two countries are often described as competitors in the region, but the reality is despite the competitive relationship they are in by default, they are also collaborators in developing Islamic finance in the region. More than one million self-identified Muslims in Canada represents 3.2 percent of the total Canadian population. In comparison, the Muslim population in the United States represents 0.9 percent of the total population. Hence, Canada has been viewed as more suitable to become the hub of Islamic finance in the region simply because the number of Muslims in Canada is greater than that found in the United States in terms of religious representation in each nation’s total population. Furthermore, in terms of the regulatory environment, though the regulatory landscape applicable to financial institutions including Islamic financial institutions in the United States is much more sophisticated, the lack of a regulatory environment in Canada for Islamic finance is viewed as an opportunity for Canada as this provides flexibility required to develop and innovate unique Islamic finance products and increase the number of institutions dealing with Islamic finance. Sharia governance is the backbone of the Islamic finance industry in any jurisdiction. A common weakness found in both countries in the development of Islamic finance is on adopting a uniform Sharia governance framework applicable to all institutions offering Islamic finance products and services. In the early 21st century, the practice of Islamic financial institutions in the region indicates that there is no uniform yardstick to adopt in this regard, leading to confusion as well as lack of confidence—not only among “laypeople” but among Sharia scholars as well—in the Sharia-compliant products offered. In the absence of regulatory backing in this regard, an agreement among the industry stakeholders in the region would be sufficient to standardize this practice and implement procedural requirements that ought to be followed in offering Sharia-compliant products and services.
