ABSTRACT
Nowadays it is often argued that Islam is in crisis. A crisis certainly exists but the culprit is not Islam; it is, instead, the massive and wide-spread poverty of Muslims. Much of this poverty is caused by the dissolution, dismemberment and the subsequent colonisation of the once powerful and rich Islamic empires by Western imperialism. Today, Islamic countries are lagging not only behind the West but also the rest of the world, according to almost any economic criteria. Democracy is not an isolated system. It comes as a complex package of institutions that include a parliament and an independent judiciary that checks the executive, as well as a set of freedoms comprising, particularly, freedoms of expression, worship and entrepreneurship. Al-Naggar had envisaged Islamic banks as risk-sharing financial institutions, friendly to capital hungry entrepreneurs, which also contained important characteristics of micro-finance. With respect to Islamic public finance, esham shares can be used for open market operations of Islamic central banks.
