22.10.2012 - Islamic finance struggles toward mainstream in Azerbaijan
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, has opened an “Islamic window” providing finance to small companies...............................................Full Article: Source
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