Anthropological and Accounting Knowledge in Islamic Banking

Top 20 FREQUENT WORDS

accounting 211 islamic 205 mudarabah 52 banking 48 standards 45 conventional 38 finance 38 aaoifi 35 financial 34 knowledge 34 depositor 29 maurer 28 social 28 critical 27 icca 27 accounts 26 practices 26 university 26 business 25 anthropological 23 bill 23 economics 23

DOCUMENT KEY POINTS

• for anthropological and critical accounting scholarship the result is an open endedness that obviates the apparent stability of the forms or relations that observers a discover structuring or underlying the practices of their subjects
• rather they assume an identity with the very form of knowledge which is intrinsic to reflexive anthropological reason a form that is based on nested hierarchies of abstraction and an inevitable partiality of perspective through which perspective as an organizing rubric for anthropological knowledge reveals itself in its own failure strathern

• i develop the argument in light of a recent and ongoing transition in the field of islamic finance with reference to ongoing debates among islamic accounting specialists in published face to face and on line foru miss the transition involves international accounting standards set by the accounting and auditing organization for islamic financial institutions aaoifi which is based in bahrain and was founded by one of gambling s former students in

• just as importantly global islamic banking owes much to the immigration of middle eastern and south asian students and professionals to the united states and britain during the s and s and the consolidation of large muslim organizations such as the islamic society of north america and the islamic circle of north america
• thus although saudi royals and entrepreneurs bankroll many islamic finance conferences journals and academic institutions around the world the main sites for intellectual production in islamic economics are the islamic foundation in leicester leicestershire uk the institute of islamic banking and insurance in london and the harvard islamic finance information program in cambridge massachusetts

• like the islamic banking network itself which i see as existing somewhere between the traditional centre and periphery of the muslim world a indeed confounding the scalar logic of centre periphery a these internet postings lie between official publications and off the record conversations and between the various branches of islamic knowledge
• people are far more likely to mix and match concepts or perspectives from different branches of islamic law in order to create or justify a particular financial practice in their on line postings than they would in a formally published bulletin or at a conference

• founded in as the financial accounting organization for islamic banks and financial institutions faoibfi and renamed in the accounting and auditing organization for islamic financial institutions aaoifi disseminated islamic accounting procedures in as part of this effort

• it seems evident however in the same manner that the facts of accounting can become evidence based on induction from the observation of a moment of social life a process that delimits the accountant s the regulator s and also the social analyst s field of practice
• the decisionusefulness framework only makes sense in a world where a person can be called forth into social interaction as a maximizing individual only in such a world would the agency problem manifest itself and the decision usefulness framework actually be useful

• yet this is a topological reality from which is derived the organization of flows of incomplete knowledge in the worldsystem but that ever grows and unifies as it does so with the elements of the world system a the essence of pairedness is the resemblance of universal complementarity within the acts of systemic realization
• one prominent economist who specializes in economic theory in islamic thought thus aroused fierce controversy when he sent the following e mail to the islamic economics and finance internet listserv islamic economics and finance being entrenched body and soul in mainstream economic doctrines has remained without a distinctive birth pang of its own

• once he or she has turned over the money as an initial investment the depositor investor has the right to verify that the manager is complying with the terms of the contract for the manager is not liable for any loss that occurs in the course of the business except when such loss occurs because of a breach of trust
• bill maurer and islamic jurisprudence not unnerving after pemberton do the facts of islamic accounting invoke in outside observers as well as devotees trust and confidence in the stable entities and clear agents of islamic banking if so they are less constitutive of an essential muslim subject of economics than they are convincing for people like the vice president of the federal reserve that the business practices from which they are distilled are sound reputable legitimate and consistent with a wide range of alternative business practices that are not specifically islamic

• rather than a depositor earning interest on a savings account the depositor investor would earn a predetermined percentage of the profits or losses effectively bearing the risk of market activities of all the enterprises in which the bank had invested the pooled resources of its depositor investors
• instead of financing its activities with interest bearing loans a business could accept funds from an islamic bank and give up a predetermined percentage of its profits and losses effectively spreading some of the risk of doing business

• given this how should an accountant a entextualize as it were the entity for the purposes of an audit silverstein urban how should the accountant draw meaningful boundaries around and abstract from the business practices of the depositorinvestors the bank and the enterprises in which the bank has invested depositor investors money the second problem that mudarabah poses for conventional accounting concerns the separation of ownership from management in the corporate form berle means maurer
• for example how should one determine the value of real property held by the bank should one enter a value based on what one originally paid for it or should the calculation be based on the original purchase price adjusted for inflation or even one based on projections of its value at some future liquidation date from the point of view of islamic banking most calculations of value of this sort introduce the possibility of riba usually glossed as a interest but defined

• the multiple agents constituted by multiple proprietors lend a a scaling shape to the imaginary account a there are similar patterns at different scales at whatever level of entity the imaginary accountant looks and a enlarging a tiny section will produce a pattern that looks similar to the whole picture and shrinking down the whole will give us something that looks like a tiny part eglash

• that said the objectives of the aaoifi standards are the same as for any set of accounting standards the provision of decision useful facts for large investors not for small depositors or mudarabah account holders
• to icca of of to foundation to icca for a prosperity of and welfare of the staff a it is divided equally among the members of figure

• of that per cent per cent is returned to the foundation that originally granted the university funds to set up icca and the remaining per cent is for the a prosperity and welfare of the staff of icca see figure

• these techniques of knowledge involve transformations in the scale of phenomena nested hierarchies of practice as in the credit co operative example figure and both the erasure of those hierarchies as in international islamic accountancy standards and bank muamalat indonesia practice and the making explicit of those hierarchies as in the internal debate over islamic accounting
• rather aaiofi standards and organizational practice exist in a co ordinated relationship and that relationship produces a grammar that makes the distinction between a rhetorical and a technical and a shari a compliant and a conventional intelligible and real

• it renders itself a transparent practice of recording facts already there in the world and in the process denies its own status as a modality of argumentation constituted by various levels of scale a set of rules for making things tell able in garfinkel s sense a tool kit for constructing those rules and the metapragmatic ad hoc and post hoc relating of those rules to each other and to actual practices

• the sections of this article could each be understood to represent one a level of abstraction the practice of islamic accountancy the theory of islamic accountancy the internal meta level debates about islamic accountancy and the spirit of islamic capitalism animating the whole
• the challenge for conventional accounting as for its critical social scientific and anthropological accounts is to be as open ended and necessarily incomplete yet whole as tawhid to dissolve itself as it approaches but never reaches the limit of the knowable

• shareholders as bearers of the risk of running the business of the bank are not theoretically similarly protected and so have an interest in the a decision usefulness of the bank s annual report as produced and verified by independent auditors
• during my research i came to know an islamic banker who is committed to this vision of islamic banking but nevertheless has had to rely on funds from his shareholders in order to maintain the bank s liquidity

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DOCUMENT WORD ANALYSIS

Main Category

AlHuda Material\islamic banking

KeyWords

islamic finance microfinance muslim services report access feasibility improving development international adb pak research islam university component social financial pakistan

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DOCUMENT REFERENCES

Number of Pages

23

Published Date

2002-12-06 13:32:12

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