Gulf Times out of Qatar has published a brief article on the basis in Islamic scripture for some of the policies and practices for Islamic commerce and finance. In reading this article, you can see the origin of the prohibition of short selling, insider trading, as well as a few other transgressions. Basically harmless stuff, but also a wide gulf of items left out, such as zakat, purification and the whole concept of sukuk and shariah mortgages, which are essentially convoluted constructs used to get around prohibitions on interest, which themselves are not without controversy in the history of Shariah finance…
