Assembling Islam and Liberalism: Market Freedom and the Moral Project of Islamic Finance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On March 1, 2010, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Doing God's Work,” which highlighted the impressive growth of Islamic banking and finance and some of the challenges that faced the industry as it expanded at unprecedented rates. Before presenting data on the proliferation of Islamic bonds and an array of statistical indicators for the achievements of Islamic finance at large, the article opened with a suggestive vignette that highlighted some of the moral questions raised by Islamic finance: At a party in Karachi a young man cradles a glass of whiskey and laughs when asked why he is in the Islamic banking industry. “It is the fastest-growing sector in Pakistan,” he says. “I want to make money, so this is where I need to be. Who cares about religion?” A corporate-finance lawyer, who is a devout Muslim, gives a very different answer: “If you do not believe that Islam and its teachings can bring about positive change to the world, then you should not be in the business.” (Phillips 2010) The contrasting vignettes presented starkly different moral orientations toward managing Islamic money. On one hand, an Islamic banker is violating one of Islam's central prohibitions and attributing his motivation to market forces; on the other is an industry player who saw Islamic finance as a moral project capable of social change. The central question that these contrasting vignettes raised was, How Islamic is Islamic finance? In other words, to what extent can Islamic finance, as a project simultaneously dedicated toward enacting Islamic values and facilitating capitalist economic action, successfully fulfill both mandates? Indeed this is a central question that animates many of those engaged in Islamic finance today and is a recurring problem for most practitioners. This problem was evident several weeks later when I attended a public forum at the ultramodern headquarters of Malaysia's Securities Commission in the Bukit Kiara section of Kuala Lumpur. The meeting, jointly organized with the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, was titled “The Contribution of Islamic Finance, Post-Global Financial Crisis” and was headlined by a number of famous scholars and practitioners with international reputations in Islamic finance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".