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The study explores the existing Shariah audit practice of Islamic banks (IBs) in Bangladesh aiming at providing suggestions for improvements on the detected shortfalls in the relevant areas.

This research applied a qualitative method, and data were collected through conducting semi-structured interviews in Bangladesh. A total of 17 interviews were conducted for accomplishing the research objectives.

The study finds that there is no comprehensive Shariah audit manual in the current operation for IBs in Bangladesh, and as such, the requirements of their Shariah compliance remain a big question. Although the Shariah audit is conducted within IBs, and the Shariah audit officers or Shariah officers inspect necessary documents while conducting the Shariah audit, they only cover 10–20% of total investments and transactions. Based on the findings of this study, it is recommended that the Shariah auditing tasks should broadly cover at least 80% of the investment portfolios, documents and financial contracts and activities.

The findings of this research are expected to significantly contribute to the regulatory authorities concerned in Bangladesh and beyond, which include the suggestions that IBs can adopt to strengthen their Shariah governance system. The study also pinpoints that in the current system, Shariah auditors' roles are somehow limited in examining and checking the investment sides with a minimal portion (10–20%), for which they are unable to perform their responsibilities in a befitting manner to provide assurance services and overall Shariah compliance of IBs activities.

This study explores the current Shariah audit systems and provides recommendations to improve the existing systems which will be beneficial for Islamic banks of Bangladesh.

To the researchers' knowledge, perhaps this is the first research of its kind which seeks to explore the current Shariah audit practice in Bangladesh qualitatively, and it provides some practical suggestions for making the necessary developments of the current audit process of IBs. In addition, there are no empirical studies in the entire Emerald insight publishers and Scopus database regarding Shariah audit practices. The study contributes to the agency, stakeholder and legitimacy theories by exploring the Shariah audit of IBs.

This study aims to explore the evolution of the Islamic capital market (ICM) from the perspective of research publications.

A bibliometric analysis was applied based on selected publications from the Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) database from 2000 to 2021. The study adopted VOSviewer software which was developed by Leiden University.

This study has some implications that need urgent action. Firstly, there are some areas that have received little attention among researchers, although they are relevant to the industry, for instance, in fintech and blockchain in ICM. Secondly, the inconsistent frequency of publications in some niche areas may suggest that there are unprecedented events that hinder further research; probably, the researcher may anticipate more information and progress in the industry. Thirdly, the need to strengthen the collaboration between industry and academia to advance research.

This study considered only the WoSCC database. The provider of WoSCC is Clarivate (formerly known as Thomson Reuters), where access to publications is limited to institutional subscribers. The implications of this study are to identify and propose future research trends in the field of ICM.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the present study is among the pioneer studies in analysing bibliometric focusing on ICM. Previous research has focused on Islamic finance and banking, and not specifically on ICM. Accordingly, this study sheds light on research gaps in ICM.

This paper aims to determine whether Islamic banks (IBs) and conventional banks (CBs) in Tunisia are distinguishable from one another based on financial characteristics during the 2005–2014 period covering the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC) and the 2011 Tunisian revolution.

For the comparison between IBs and CBs, 11 hypotheses are formulated to distinguish between the two types of banks. The authors use a univariate analysis based on the multi-dimension figures investigation and a multivariate one based on the robust OLS technique for panel linear regression with mixed effects.

Bank-specific factors, dummy and dummy interacting variables indicate that there are differences between Islamic and conventional bank behavior. Both methods show that IBs are more liquid, more profitable and riskier than CBs. Post-2011 Tunisian revolution, small IBs (small CBs) are more (less) solvent, large IBs are more stable and both types of banks are more liquid, which explain why Tunisian governments have relay on bank system to cover budget deficits post-2011 revolution.

In investigating the feature of IBs and CBs from the Tunisian context, the authors take into account the effect of two abnormal events (2008 GFC and 2011 Tunisian revolution) on IBs through interaction variables.