BAKU/TBILISI (Reuters) - When a businessman in Muslim-majority Azerbaijan wanted a bank loan that complied with Islamic principles, until a few years ago he had to negotiate it under the table. The government's fear of political Islam forced banks to conduct "guerrilla Islamic finance" in which sharia-compliant deals were hidden under the appearance of conventional banking, says Fuad Aliyev, a scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington DC. Now several banks in Azerbaijan openly offer a limited range of services based on Islamic principles including bans on interest and pure monetary speculation. The country's largest bank, majority-owned by the state,...
0 Responses to Islamic finance struggles toward mainstream in Azerbaijan