Introduction

Muḥammad Taqī ʿUthmānī (b. 1943) is among the most influential Islamic jurists of the contemporary period. Born in Deoband, India, and raised in Karachi, he received a comprehensive traditional Islamic education and became a prominent scholar of Ḥanafī fiqh, hadīth, and Islamic economics. He served for many years as a judge (qāḍī) in the Federal Shariat Court and the Shariat Appellate Bench of Pakistan's Supreme Court, and has been a member of the Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. His writings on Islamic finance, of which this work is representative, emerge from decades of practical engagement with the question of how Islamic legal principles can be applied to the institutions and instruments of a modern commercial economy. His scholarship in this field is grounded in classical fiqh methodology and is characterised by a careful distinction between what the texts prohibit, what they permit, and what requires fresh juristic reasoning (ijtihād) through analogy and public interest.

The central argument of works examining the Quranic basis of Islamic finance is that the divine prohibition of ribā, stated emphatically in Sūrat al-Baqarah (2:275-279) and in other Quranic passages, is not merely a prohibition of a specific historical practice but a comprehensive theological and economic principle. The Quran contrasts ribā directly with bayʿ (trade), stating that God has permitted trade and forbidden interest. From this foundational distinction the entire architecture of Islamic finance is constructed. Works in this area trace the Quranic and hadīth definitions of ribā al-faḍl (surplus in exchange of the same commodity) and ribā al-nasīʾah (increment for deferral of payment), and show how these prohibitions generate the need for equity-based and asset-backed financial structures. The permitted alternatives examined include mushārakah (partnership), muḍārabah (profit-sharing investment), murābaḥah (cost-plus sale), ijārah (leasing), salam (forward sale), and istiṣnāʿ (commissioned manufacture).

The scholarly significance of grounding Islamic finance explicitly in Quranic theology, rather than presenting it purely as a regulatory or ethical preference, is considerable. It establishes that the prohibition of ribā is not a culturally contingent ruling subject to revision by changing economic circumstances, but a divine command of the same categorical status as the prohibition of intoxicants or the obligation of zakāh. This theological grounding also provides the criterion by which nominally Islamic financial products can be evaluated: a product that reproduces the economic effect of an interest-bearing loan through legal artifice (ḥīlah) without genuine risk-sharing or asset ownership fails the Quranic standard regardless of the formal contract used. Works by scholars such as ʿUthmānī have been influential in setting these evaluative standards for the global Islamic finance industry and in resisting the reduction of Islamic finance to a rebranded version of conventional banking.

Readers approaching this work should bring with them a basic familiarity with the relevant Quranic verses and their tafsīr, as the theological argument is most compelling when the reader can engage directly with the scriptural text. The chapters on the prohibited forms of ribā require careful reading, since the distinction between legitimate deferred payment arrangements and prohibited interest-bearing loans can appear subtle to those trained in conventional financial thinking. Readers with a background in conventional finance will find it useful to suspend the assumption that the time value of money is an objective economic law rather than a convention, since Islamic finance challenges precisely that assumption at the level of revealed principle. This work is best read not as a technical manual for financial practitioners, though it has practical implications, but as a theological account of why the Quranic prohibition of ribā remains binding and how it shapes the entire landscape of permissible Muslim economic activity.