The former governor of the State Bank of Pakistan Dr Ishrat Husain, voiced uncharacteristically resentful one morning in November 2021. His disposition was in difference with the upbeat sense of the campus at the Institute of Business Management where flavored bankers in strong claims and streaming beards had collected to seize role in a meeting on Islamic banking, a relatively mundane liaison the advocates of Islamic banking indulge in every rare months to pat themselves on the back for accomplishing banking the halal way.
Dr Husain notified the self-satisfied Islamic bankers that they had evolved “complacent” over the previous two decades. The Sharia-compliant banking enterprise had plunged “brief of the anticipations” he had when as governor, he handed out the country’s first Islamic banking license at the arch of the century. Something had gone wrong with Islamic banking, despite all the advertisement its backers had assembled up, partially founded on cherry-picked data. Precisely a year later, in November 2022, the Administration of Pakistan declared openly it was targeting a complete transition from traditional to Islamic banking by the end of 2027.