One notable feature of Islamic finance is women’s role in interpreting Shariah compliance in the legal regimes that frame the market. In international finance globally, however, women are underrepresented both in financial services and global state economic governance institutions. Indeed Islamic finance is often framed as a response to the intensely gendered inequality fostered through contemporary processes of centralization and consolidation of capital. Some proponents view Islamic finance as an attempt to reassert social control within capital markets by re-regulating in favor of the productive use of capital (mooring financial capital to productive use through a prohibition of interest) and transparency (promoting the equitable sharing of risk). Exploring who gets what and why in the globalization of women’s Shariah expertise in Islamic finance, in 2013 and 2014, the project conducted six months of fieldwork including forty interviews and extensive participant observation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia and Doha, Qatar – cities which represent competing models of sustainable economic development as currently framed both within regimes of Islam and regimes of finance.
The project explains and evaluates the transformative potential of the intertwining and conflicting political projects aimed at promoting elite dominance nationally, Malaysian and Qatari expertise internationally, and gender equity globally. These scale-making projects are a particularly important aspect of the competition for rule-making power in the ongoing international standardization between Gulf Cooperation Council, Southeast Asian, and core country regimes. Further, as Islamic finance is by some measures the fastest growing segment of global finance overall, the question of whose expertise (both as embodied practice and as method) will be promoted and whose will be marginalized is particularly salient for accounts of social justice and gender equity in the ongoing re-regulation of global finance. Indeed, in crafting the re-regulation of moral economies, both orthodox market models and heterodox market models must account for the embodied and discursive practices of market experts. By documenting the discourses and embodied practices of elite Muslim women as agents of economic change, the project evaluates the transformative potential of alternative economic moralities at work in global financial regimes.
Across disciplines, scholars have documented the reflexive or looping feedback effects between economic theories, ethical theories, and market practices. The project builds on this insight into the reflexive dynamics of theory and practice in economics by examining the creation of normative, gendered frameworks within Islamic finance. Globally gendered discourses in finance position women both as more meticulous relative to men but also as more focused on reproduction. In Malaysia and Qatar, these discourses have the effect of restricting the transformative potential of women’s market expertise. Since women are perceived by market participants as constantly on the edge of choosing family over work, a more market-oriented, neoliberal approach provides a shield against others’ reframing of women’s expertise as external to the market. As these gendered frameworks shape the practice of Islamic finance into more market-oriented channels, this case vitiates recent research claiming Islamic finance is distinguished by a lack of calculative, self-interested maximizing rationality.
Laura Elder is Associate Professor in Economic Anthropology, at the Department of Global Studies, St. Mary’s College, Indiana, U.S.A.