Introduction

Mufti Muḥammad Taqī ʿUthmānī was born in 1943 in Deoband, India, into a family of distinguished Islamic scholarship; his father, Mufti Muḥammad Shafīʿ, was among the foremost Ḥanafī jurists of the twentieth century. Taqī ʿUthmānī pursued advanced studies at Darul ʿUloom Karachi, where he later taught and eventually served as vice-president, and simultaneously built a distinguished career as a judge on the Federal Shariat Court and the Shariat Appellate Bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan. His decades of practical engagement with legal questions arising from the Pakistani financial system gave him an unparalleled vantage point from which to address the challenge of reconstructing financial institutions on an Islamic basis. By the time this work appeared in English, ʿUthmānī had already produced seminal Arabic and Urdu studies on ribā and its modern forms, and he had participated in the scholarly bodies that were shaping the emerging global Islamic finance industry.

This book sets out to accomplish something that is at once practical and foundational: to explain, in accessible but rigorous terms, what Islamic finance is, why it differs from conventional banking, and how its principal instruments operate. The opening sections define ribā with precision, distinguishing between ribā al-naṣīʾah, the increase stipulated on a loan, and ribā al-faḍl, the exchange of the same commodity in unequal amounts, and demonstrating why both are categorically prohibited in the Quran and the authenticated Sunnah. ʿUthmānī then devotes sustained attention to the four primary contracts around which Islamic financial products are constructed: murābaḥah, a cost-plus sale used in trade financing; ijārah, a lease contract applicable to both assets and services; mushārakah, a partnership in which all parties share profits and losses according to agreed ratios; and muḍārabah, a sleeping partnership in which one party supplies capital and the other supplies expertise and management. For each instrument he sets out the classical juristic conditions for validity, identifies the ways in which modern institutions have adapted the contracts, and flags the points at which current practice requires further reform to meet the standards of the original fiqh.

The scholarly significance of this work rests on several foundations. First, it makes the conclusions of classical Ḥanafī jurisprudence, as elaborated in the great medieval compendia, accessible to readers with no prior training in Arabic or fiqh, thereby broadening the audience for serious Islamic economic reasoning. Second, ʿUthmānī does not simply endorse current industry practice; he subjects it to rigorous critique, arguing candidly that many products marketed as Islamic are deficient because they replicate the economic substance of interest-bearing loans without satisfying the juristic requirements of genuine risk-sharing. This critical posture distinguishes the work from apologetic treatments and has made it a reference point for scholars and regulators seeking to evaluate the authenticity of new financial products. The book has been assigned in university programmes across the Muslim world and beyond, and it continues to inform the deliberations of Sharīʿah supervisory boards attached to major Islamic financial institutions.

Readers approaching this text are advised to engage with it on two levels simultaneously. On the doctrinal level, careful attention to the proofs adduced from the Quran, the Sunnah, and the works of the classical fuqahāʾ will reveal the depth of the prohibition of ribā and the positive vision of an economy built on genuine exchange and risk-sharing. On the practical level, the detailed exposition of each contract type equips the reader to evaluate financial products encountered in real life and to ask the right questions of Sharīʿah advisers. The work is best read alongside the classical sources cited, particularly the relevant sections of al-Kāsānī's Badāʾiʿ al-Ṣanāʾiʿ and Ibn Qudāmah's al-Mughnī, which provide the juristic foundation ʿUthmānī presupposes. Taken as a whole, the book is an invitation to understand Islamic finance not as a niche product category but as an expression of a comprehensive moral order governing economic life.