“Sometimes it looks fake”: Hiyal and contrivances as tools for exploring aspirations for radical social change: Hiyal, contrivances, and other tools

Aaron Z. Pitluck

Economic Anthropology, 2024, vol. 11, issue 2, 235-245

Abstract: On one hand, Islamic banking and finance is an aspiration to radically transform banks and the financial system to conform with interpretations of Islamic ethics and morals. On the other hand, such high aspirations patently conflict with the existing global, US$3.6 trillion market dominated by profit‐oriented private banks. These aspirations also potentially conflict with the technical details of how financial products are constructed to be “Shariah compliant.” How do Islamic financial practitioners reconcile their vision of the Islamic good society with the products and processes observed at work? One such theological tool and cultural concept is to interpret Islamic financial products as relying on hiyal, a legal stratagem used to provide remedies and alleviate predicaments, to provide an escape from the unlawful to the lawful. This essay summarizes how thinkers in Malaysia are developing the concept of hiyal either to critique or to promote Islamic finance. As a contribution to anthropological and postcolonial theorizing, the essay concludes by exploring how the concept of hiyal can help us understand contrivances, conspiracies, cons, and stratagems. This theoretical tool kit can assist social scientists in exploring the gap between people's economic behaviors and their aspirations for what a good economy should look like.

Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12324

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:11:y:2024:i:2:p:235-245

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=2330-4847

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Economic Anthropology from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().