Sukuk and Islamic Capital Markets

The Islamic Capital Market is often considered as an olive branch for the Islamic finance industry because it tends to resolve many intricate financial issues such as liquidity management, availability of treasury products and the creation of money market. Rahail Ali’s edited book is an appropriate resource, especially for lawyers. The book contains articles written by experts who have first-hand experience of sukuk. It is an attempt to address practical issues for practitioners and is appropriately adorned with experimental examples to give the necessary flavour to the issuance of sukuk.

In the words of Rahail Ali, ‘the book is designed to provide a practical understanding of the Islamic Capital Market (Sukuk Market)’. Though technically the Islamic Capital Market would also include shares, but for the purpose of this book all the chapters revolve around the issue of sukuk. The book comprises five parts:

Part 1 gives an overview of the sukuk and money markets. It is argued that the perennial difficulties that Islamic finance institutions face in transferring their short term liabilities into long term assets provided the conceptual impetus for the sukuk market, which led to the development of many sukuk products. Mark Morris aptly engages with the unfolding of the factors that hamper the development of the Islamic money market. This is a crucial issue which requires to be resolved in order to attend to the liquidity risk exposures.