ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a modern history of Islam’s financial trajectories in South Asia. Focusing on the politics of Islamization in Pakistan, it examines the role of the Deobandī clerical community and business corporations in promoting Islamic finance. I argue that South Asia’s transition from a pre-colonial era of mercantile capitalism to contemporary regimes of global finance has transformed Islamic commercial law from a cosmopolitan legal tradition to a standardized code of corporate governance. While such standardization has facilitated the integration of modern institutions of Islamic banking and finance in circuits of global capital, it has also deracinated Islamic commercial law from its organic roots in local customs and everyday commercial life in South Asia. Rather than presenting this history as the unfolding of an Asian chapter within a universal logic of capitalist transition, or as the fateful subsumption of religion by secular forces of the market, I describe the workings of Islamic finance in South Asia through a moving assemblage of state institutions, religious seminaries, and transnational financial corporations.
