Book Review: Nicholas Dylan Ray: Arab Islamic Banking and the Renewal of Islamic Law, Reviewed by: MOHAMMED HASHIM KAMALI مراجعة علمية لكتاب: المصرفية الإسلامية العربية وتجديد الشريعة الإسلامية - تأليف: نيكولاس ديلان راي - مراجعة: محمد هاشم كمالي

Originally a Ph.D. dissertation completed under the supervision of Professor Andrew Hess of Boston’s Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the book under review was published as part of the Arab and Islamic Law Series under the General Editorship of Dr. Mark Hoyle. Although the author has explained the choice of his title, which is confined basically to a study of Islamic banking of the Arab Middle East, that point of information could have been conveyed somewhat differently perhaps than what the author has done. The author’s choice of words “Arab Islamic Banking” in the title is questionable. For the title invokes the question whether Islamic banking as a phenomenon is divisible into its Arab and non-Arab varieties, and the answer to this is clearly in the negative. None of the Islamic banks in the Arab world which the author has reviewed and discussed have identified themselves by the epithet “Arab”, and there is, I am sure the author would agree, not enough basis for a distinction of Islamic banking into such categories. Islam itself is not divisible in that way, nor is the Sharia, nor fiqh for that matter. No one has, to the best of my knowledge, attempted to distinguish Arab Islamic banking from Islamic banking in other parts of the Muslim world. A preferable rendering of the title that Ray has chosen could be “Islamic banking in the Arab Middle East”.