On March 1, 2010, the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Doing God's Work,” which highlighted the impressive growth of Islamic banking and finance and some of the challenges that faced the industry as it expanded at unprecedented rates. Before presenting data on the proliferation of Islamic bonds and an array of statistical indicators for the achievements of Islamic finance at large, the article opened with a suggestive vignette that highlighted some of the moral questions raised by Islamic finance:

The contrasting vignettes presented starkly different moral orientations toward managing Islamic money. On one hand, an Islamic banker is violating one of Islam's central prohibitions and attributing his motivation to market forces; on the other is an industry player who saw Islamic finance as a moral project capable of social change. The central question that these contrasting vignettes raised was, How Islamic is Islamic finance? In other words, to what extent can Islamic finance, as a project simultaneously dedicated toward enacting Islamic values and facilitating capitalist economic action, successfully fulfill both mandates?

Indeed this is a central question that animates many of those engaged in Islamic finance today and is a recurring problem for most practitioners. This problem was evident several weeks later when I attended a public forum at the ultramodern headquarters of Malaysia's Securities Commission in the Bukit Kiara section of Kuala Lumpur. The meeting, jointly organized with the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, was titled “The Contribution of Islamic Finance, Post-Global Financial Crisis” and was headlined by a number of famous scholars and practitioners with international reputations in Islamic finance.