The state's responses to private Islamic finance experiments in Egypt

Abstract

Since the emergence of private sector Islamic finance in Egypt, the Egyptian state decided to follow a sophisticated strategy aimed mainly at solving a contradiction: the need to meet a growing demand for Islamic financial products, without letting the supply fall under the exclusive control of actors viewed as competitors of the state, both economically and politically, and ultimately as the financial arm of political Islam. The creation of Nasser Social Bank in the early 1970s and the subsequent opening of Islamic branches of conventional banks were part of such a strategy, as was the mufti of the Republic's official entry into the debate on Islamic finance in the late eighties. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.