Sustainability of the Islamic finance industry: overcoming the challenges

Abstract

Islamic finance has been around for the past four decades and it has experienced a remarkable growth globally. With this significant growth in a short time span, their concern now should move to ensuring the sustainability of the industry so that it will continue to thrive and not experience any form of major hiccups. This research aims to identify several prominent issues faced by the industry and suggest plausible remedies. This is a qualitative research, where content analysis of relevant articles was made under five identified categories: absence of standardisation, regulatory issues, legal issues, shari’a scholars’ shortage and lack of awareness and inefficiency in reaching customer. The result indicates that the Islamic finance industry still has to fulfil the requirements of several niche areas and work its ways to address more pressing issues.