| Publication |
2008.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The most likely route for Islamisation in Pakistan is not Islamist political parties, or military officers, but its Supreme Court enforcing the Islamic provisions of the country's Constitution. In 1999, at the culmination of two decades of increasing Islamisation, the Pakistani Supreme Court ruled the country's entire banking system, officially Islamic since 1985, to be insufficiently so. It ordered its complete restructuring. Now direct equity participation by banks was the sole permissible financing mode. This happened mainly due to the constitutionally-mandated roles for sharia and the ulema in the legal system. Yet upon final appeal, the Court reversed its ruling and remanded the issue to a lower court for further study, thereby granting the banking system a reprieve. How permanent is this reprieve likely to be?
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