Wan Nursofiza Wan Azmi known as Dr. Sofiza Azmi is an accomplished author whose book Islamic Finance and Banking System is one of the most popular books on the topic. She is, therefore, probably the only women in Islamic finance, whose book has been published in three international languages. As a prolific writer, she contributes regularly to the newspapers and magazines, and founded Asian Link, a quarterly publication of Asian Institute of Finance AIF. Sofiza Azmi belongs to the second generation of Islamic finance experts who went through academic training in the field.

Prior to this generation, those who played lead roles in the development of Islamic banking and finance acquired knowledge and expertise in the field through self-study and practice. Engku Rabiah Ali from Malaysia is perhaps the most influential woman jurist today. She has inspired a new generation of female jurists to get actively involved in Islamic banking and finance. As a regular speaker at conferences around the world, she has become an influential thought leader in the Islamic financial services industry.

Prior to joining Path Solutions, she held various senior positions across a variety of sectors including television, advertising, IT and telecommunications. While being at Path Solutions, she has supported a number of path-breaking industry-building initiatives all over the world. As a fluent speaker of French, English and Arabic, she serves as an eloquent spokesperson for Islamic finance. Rosie has contributed to several publications in the area of finance, focusing on financial markets and IT trends.

Wafica Ali Ghoul is a thought leader in Islamic economics, banking and finance in Lebanon. She is well known for her critical analysis of Islamic banking and finance practices. As a prolific writer, she has contributed numerous articles and papers to the journals of international repute. She is also a regular contributor to the blog site www.

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Samina Akram belongs to the new generation of Islamic financial entrepreneurs. After a brief stint at Merrill Lynch where she was involved in establishing and leading the strategic positioning of the Islamic finance within the bank, Samina decided to set up a consultancy business in Islamic finance in London. She was instrumental in establishing and leading the strategic positioning of the Islamic finance business at a major global investment bank. In this article, JeanMathieu Potvin explores the contrasting debates between jurists in the International Islamic Fiqh Academy on minority opinions.

He finds that legal interpretative methods have evolved from staying within the boundaries of one school of thought to a multi-school framework. Indeed, these fatwa bodies endeavor to reconstruct authority through consensus-building and limiting disagreement among Shari'a scholars on emerging issues. The fatwas of the Academy are not legally binding but are nonetheless influential as a body of. They have been particularly important for Islamic finance. This article deals with how IIFA and its member jurists attempt to define irregular or weak legal opinions as well as exclude it from fatwa-making.

Such an analysis is useful for locating, not only the diversity of modern fiqh discourse, but the ongoing emergence of a multi-legal school interpretive community. As the legal thinker Dr. Khaled Abou El Fadl has stated, legal opinion is formed within interpretive communities that share a significant level of epistemological.

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The following assessment gives an insight into how paradigms have shifted in the modern age, and how interpretative methods are adapting. Its body is composed of 58 prominent scholars from different OIC member states who are part of a wider global network of scholars active in many fatwa councils and international fiqh conferences, though not. There is alongside the group of state-appointed members, a category of 17 elite members appointed directly by IIFA, who are generally more proactive and more influential than the others.

Most of these elite members are from Arab countries. IIFA is a multi-Islamic legal school international fiqh council. Opinions from the Hanafi, Maliki and Hanbali schools of legal thought madh'hab are most prominent in research papers and discussions while Shafi, Twelver Shia, Zaydi, Ibadi and Zahiri schools, though recognized, are far less present or quoted. The Academy issues resolutions on the basis of consensus or majority vote, but does not include in them dissenting opinions these will be found in the detailed transcriptions of the deliberations.

If this is the case, then what is the sound opinion and how is it determined? Madh'habs have been characterized both by a staggering internal diversity of opinions and a history of development over several centuries in multiple localities. The opinion that did not pass an evaluation as sound or preponderant was termed weak or irregular shadhdh. Interestingly, prominent members of IIFA consider resolutions of the Academy to preponderate over rival opinions because they represent the agreement of the majority of contemporary Shari'a scholars.

How does the Academy deal with the irregular opinion? The Academy has barred consideration of the irregular opinion in the process of giving a legal ruling in two of its resolutions. The first one, concerning. In the second resolution, concerning the conditions and manners of issuing fatwas no. This echoes the fact that the status of irregular and weak opinions was contested in the Academy discussions that surrounded the first resolution.

In these discussions, the majority of members led by Shaykh Wahba Zuhayli upheld the above-mentioned wording. On the other hand, a minority of scholars objected to the systematic rejection of weak and irregular opinions. Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi mentioned that some of Ibn Taymiya's opinions that were initially classified as weak gained strength within the hanbali school and the wider juristic community in later ages; also, Shaykh Mukhtar Salami, in light of Maliki doctrine cited the authoritative practice of selecting the weak opinion based on local judicial precedent; and Shaykh Mustafa al-Tarzi pointed to the adoption of weak opinions in the Ottoman Majallah and the Tunisian code of personal status.

Nevertheless, none of these scholars went so far as to put in question the boundaries constituted by the agreed upon rulings mentioned in the second resolution. Debating opinions on modern financial practices A case concerning the debate on the activities of conventional banks illustrates this shared presupposition well.

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However in the same year, the Academy responded with a fatwa stressing the prohibition of all forms of banking interest. The fatwa was based on what its members considered to be a contemporary consensus of the jurists. They listed joint fatwas from many international conferences and fiqh academies - several from IIFA itself — evidencing a consensus amongst the jurists that banking interest is prohibited.

However, in cases where a unanimous. Another example is the Academy deliberations concerning zakah on real estate which occurred in revolving around a marginal opinion held by Yusuf al-Qaradawi which he made great efforts to authorize through the Academy. First, all the participants agreed that no specific text of the Qur'an and Sunna dealt directly with the topic.

Qaradawi mentioned his concern about. If the prevailing majority view was applied, rich property holders would be exempted from zakah while poor farmers in countries such as Indonesia would remain subject to it, an affront to the spirit of zakah. In order to determine the applicable rate of zakah, Qaradawi made an innovative analogy with the case of agricultural land.

Qaradawi then attempted to buttress his position with an eclectic list of classical and modern reformist opinions. He admitted that these were in the minority, but he argued that due to the change of.

These included the following: 1 There is a quasi-consensus on the opinion that zakah is not extracted from all wealth but only from four categories specified in the source texts money, livestock, agricultural produce and minerals ; 2 According to a majority of jurists, zakah is an issue categorized as worship, therefore it is not subject to reasoning by analogy; 3 Additional state-levied taxes or appeals to voluntary charity are viable alternatives to zakah.

In the end, Qaradawi lost his case to the overwhelming majority of his colleagues who adopted what they agreed to be the dominant view. This is not the only time the Academy rejected the innovative reasoning of a prominent member, when it was judged to contradict widely shared understandings of fiqh principles.

One such principle is that of the prohibition of gharar, which can be translated as excessive risk or uncertainty leading to dispute. The famous scholar Mustafa al-Zarqa, one of the founding members of the Academy, had been defending the commercial insurance contract since His main argument was that, although insurance contracts viewed individually involved a lot of risk and uncertainty gharar , when these contracts are viewed in the aggregate as an institution, uncertainty is minimized.

In this, Zuhayli was fully supported by the rest of the Academy as well as the precedents of other international fiqh bodies, who preferred to support an Islamic alternative contract called takaful or cooperative insurance. Although the weight of corroborative precedent is a key argument in most Academy discussions, it has on occasion been outweighed by other arguments. For example, in IIFA had to review a juristic opinion developed 11 years earlier by Sami Humud relating to the murabaha transaction, whereby a customer asks the bank to buy a given property and promises to purchase it from him on credit.

Ibn Shubruma that made the promise binding rather than optional. The first Islamic banks were in a predicament because they had been hindered by a lack of products and had received little concrete fiqh guidance as to viable alternatives to banking with interest.

Nonetheless, the members of the Academy were sharply split between those who approved the legal binding nature of the promise and those who gave it only a moral sanction. Opponents sided with the classical majority. Interestingly, prominent contemporary Malikis such as Abdallah Bin Bayya stated that the ruling was not the sound opinion in their school. Similarly, other cases involving a weak opinion have been propped up by the majority of IIFA jurists after protracted debate , when the opinion was shown to be established in the widespread practice or positive law codes of Muslim countries Conversely, contractual practices specific to certain localities, based on a particular school, but considered isolated by most Academy scholars have usually been rejected.

The sale of debt at a discount bay al-dayn is found mainly in Malaysia and based on interpretations of the Shafi school; however according to the Academy, as well as most scholars outside of Malaysia, this transaction amounts to riba. Indeed, the adherence of most Academy scholars to classical definitions of consensus and what constitute clear source texts provides a shared minimal framework to facilitate discussions about what is an irregular or weak doctrine and whether it should be accepted or not.

However, if the said doctrine has already been widely rehabilitated by an important section of the fiqh community or contemporary legislation or general practice, then this will tend to remove the weakness or irregularity. One effect of this phenomenon is for the Academy to isolate the reformist opinions that stand out the most from the cumulative consensus of the international fiqh bodies on the one hand i.

This article is based on a presentation given for a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara in February I wanted to be a detective.

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It was an aspiration drawn from my two favourite story book characters - Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew. My book of course! That is my treasure and something that is a legacy for my kids and may be an inspiration for others. For the most part of my early school days, I attended school in Montreal, Canada.

Then continued my studies in Malaysia before pursuing my bachelor and master degrees in UK. Later, I went to Australia to embark on one of my most exciting journeys - PhD. It was during this time that my love with Islamic finance blossomed. Who was your mentor? My dad. He is a prime example that having passion, ambition and desire to achieve something are the driving forces of success. Please tell us about your book on Islamic finance, which has been published in English, Russian and Mandarin.

The English version of the book was first published in After it became one of the top selling books in Islamic finance it was translated into Russian and, recently, Mandarin. Ambition or talent: which matters more to success? I believe ambition is more important than talent, because the latter can be replaced to a large extent by hard work, whereas the former is a prerequisite for everything.

Do you think Islamic banking and finance is providing a platform to women to professionally grow? In recent years, we have seen women rising in the Islamic banking and finance industry but it is in Malaysia that women have made significant inroads with Tan Sri Zeti Akhtar Aziz, Governor Bank Negara Malaysia, leading the pack. Your career has so far evolved around academia and research.

Do you think you will one day take a plunge into the hardcore practice of Islamic banking and finance? I started my career as an academic, which later evolved into more startegic and advisory roles. Now as Head of Strategy and Policy Development, I am taking a far more greater role, beyond purely research.

I have always been involved in Islamic banking and finance and will continue to contribute and support the industry's development.

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What drives you? What drives and excites me is having the opportunity to learn, engage and grow with new ideas and great people. What is the greatest achievement of your life so far?