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Islamic finance and Halal product sectors are thriving successfully. This chapter is a general review of the perception of Asian consumers on Islamic finance and Halal sectors in the global Halal economy.

The first section will briefly describe the Halal concept in both Islamic finance and Halal industries, and the growth of both sectors in Asian countries. The second part highlights the review of Asian consumers’ perception towards Islamic finance products and Halal products.

The review found that the consumers’ perception towards the Islamic finance products and Halal products is distinctive. This is due to the diversity of Asian countries in terms of geography, religion, culture, ethnic, school of thoughts (madzahib), income per capita and government’s involvement.

The third part of the chapter concentrates on planning towards Halal marketing, which involves the move and future challenges in different layers of industries to gear up and strengthen the Halal economy.

This chapter provides a case study on a Sharīʿah-compliant home facility contract based on the Bai Bithaman Ājil (BBA) contract, generally used by Islamic banks in Malaysia. The study emphasises on the need to comply with the existing legal framework and execute relevant contracts in line with the Sharīʿah resolutions of the Sharīʿah Advisory Council of Bank Negara Malaysia without causing harm (ḍarar) to the customers or introducing uncertain elements or procedures (gharar) in the execution of the agreements. This chapter is based on doctrinal analysis of the relevant issues as well as a qualitative legal research through content analysis of relevant BBA agreements, case law as well as statutory provisions. The case study used in this chapter is completely anonymised. The study finds that the execution of BBA agreements in Malaysia leaves much to be desired. Even though the regulatory framework for Sharīʿah-compliant home financing in Malaysia is robust, there are some legal and Sharīʿah considerations which the stakeholders need to look into in order to project Malaysia as the main global hub of Islamic finance. This study demonstrates the need for proper Sharīʿah auditing of the practical execution of BBA agreements to avoid an incorporated element of gharar at the time of execution of the agreements, which might ultimately lead to unforeseen reputation risks for the bank. Though there are several studies on the Sharīʿah, financing and accounting aspects of the BBA home facility agreement, this study focusses on both Sharīʿah and legal issues, using the case study approach. The recommendations are expected to provide a good policy framework for the stakeholders in the Islamic financial services industry in Malaysia.

The principles of sustainable development argue that organizations should make decisions not only based on economic or financial factors but also based on the long-term social and environmental consequences. The Code on Corporate Governance is one of the drivers for corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting in Malaysia. Additionally, the way managers execute their responsibilities may be affected by their own tradition, beliefs, values, and culture. Thus, this chapter aims to examine the relationship between corporate governance characteristics and CSR disclosure and to investigate the influence of cultural values (Board’s Culture Domination) on the relationship between corporate governance and corporate social responsibility. A sample of 150 companies from the main board of Bursa Malaysia for year ended 2006 are chosen for the purpose of this study due to the year of the introduction of Bursa Malaysia CSR Framework. Based on available data, a CSR index is constructed. Hierarchical regression analysis is used to examine the relationship between the CSR disclosure index and the independent variables and also the moderating effect of Board’s Culture Domination. Results show that government ownership and audit committees have a positive and significant influence on CSR disclosure. Furthermore, the findings show that the Board’s Culture Domination moderate the relationship between audit committee, number of shareholders, foreign ownership, and CSR disclosure.

This chapter discusses whether marketing can ever be Islamic given the common view of marketing functions as unsustainable and sometimes unethical, for example, how marketing promotes materialism.

This chapter reviews extant literatures in Islamic marketing, with a particular emphasis on stakeholder orientation in marketing.

We argue that Islamic marketing is indeed compatible with the concepts of ethical and sustainable marketing encompassing social, environmental as well as economic perspectives and encourages ethical behaviour.

This chapter highlights that discussions on Islamic marketing should include sustainable marketing and emphasises the growing importance of stakeholder orientation in marketing.

Al-Qaeda is conventionally portrayed as a monolithic, hierarchical organization whose activities – coordinated by the network's leader Osama bin Laden – are the source of international terrorism today. Al-Qaeda is considered a radical tendency within the broader Islamist Salafi movement, legitimizing its terrorist operations as a global Islamist jihad against Western civilization. Al-Qaeda's terrorist activity today is considered, “blowback” from long finished CIA and western covert operations in Afghanistan.

The conventional wisdom is demonstrably false. After the Cold War, Western connections with al-Qaeda proliferated around the world, challenging mainstream conceptions of al-Qaeda's identity. Western covert operations and military – intelligence connections in strategic regions show that “al-Qaeda” is a network whose raison d’etre and modus operandi are inextricably embedded in a disturbing conglomerate of international Western diplomatic, financial, military and intelligence policies today. US, British, and Western power routinely manipulates al-Qaeda through a complex network of state-regional and human nodes. Such manipulation extended directly to the 9-11 hijackers, and thus to the events of 9-11 itself.11This paper advances an original argument based partially on research in Ahmed (2005), supplemented here with significant new data and analysis. Also see Ahmed (2002).

Malaysia is one of the developing countries which is progressing in terms of infrastructural facilities, but the country is facing a problem of having very low growth in population and this led to the frequent migration of workers with language proficiency to come to the country as foreign workers, language proficiency implications among which is causing injury to workers in the construction especially foreigners as they are getting it difficult to understand instruction during operations, safety guides and interpreting safety warning signs due to their low language proficiency. Because of this, the research aimed to reduce the rate of accident happening among the foreign workers and, therefore, the research sets three objectives: the research identified the common types of accidents faced by foreign workers due to language proficiency in construction sites, the research also investigated the extent to which language proficiency is affecting foreign workers and lastly provides an effective communication method that will help to minimise the rate of these types of accidents. The research found that language proficiency is causing several types of accidents that comes with different injury cases ranging from non-severe, severe and fatal once of about 44% of the total accident cases happening in the Malaysian construction industries.

The main objective of this study is to identify the main determinants of the Islamic banks’ performance in Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) regions.

The research uses both static model (fixed effects and random effects) and Generalized method of Moments (GMM). The data for this study are obtained from the annual reports of 29 Islamic banks from GCC countries using Bankscope database for the period from 2005 to 2013.

The empirical findings reveal that Islamic banks’ specific factors such as the equity financing and bank size are positive and statistically significant to the profitability of Islamic banks. The operating efficiency ratio is negatively and statistically significant to return on asset. It is also found that macroeconomic variables such as money supply and inflation are negatively and statistically significant to the performance of Islamic banks whereas oil price has been found positive and statistically significant to the performance of Islamic banks in the GCC region.

The present study seeks to fill a demanding gap in the literature by providing new empirical evidence on the factors that influence the profitability of the Islamic banking sector in GCC regions.

These findings have significant contribution to the literature by comprehensively clarifying and critically analyzing the current state of profitability among the Islamic banks in GCC regions.