The Hard Truth of Islamic Finance

This “A Mini Guide to Accounting for Islamic Financial Products” starts with the development of Islamic finance as well as accounting standards and development of AAOIFI which aims to develop standards on accounting, auditing, ethics and governance and disseminate them on the target market.

The guide also highlights selected accounting issues addressed by AAOIFI : substance over form, prudence, mudarabah investment accounts and asset valuation. This is followed by how information of financial statement of an Islamic bank helps its major users, like equity holders, holders of investment accounts, regulatory agencies and others.

The guide also points out the main differences in the presentation of financial statements of Islamic Financial Institutions. Among them are: how assets are defined and inclusion of equity of unrestricted investment account holders. The differences arise as a result of utilizing a Shari’ah compliant contract to bring into effect a particular product.

The last section discusses some of the more popular contracts such as murabahah, istisna’, ijarah, mudarabah and musharakah. A few case studies are also incorporated for different contracts to give more understanding on the topic to the readers.