The Objectives of the Prohibition of Riba By: Elhadi Habbani

Introduction:
Although Islamic finance industry has grown rapidly during the last 40 years and become a universal phenomenon as part of the international whole banking industry evolution which is moving very fast in terms of innovation of new products, financing practices, contracts, modern hedging tools, and new services putting serious challenges before Islamic industry to exert more efforts at all levels to create a competitive alternative Shariah permissible hedging tools and financing instrument to meet the rapidly increasing customers' needs, most of researches relating to Riba remains somewhat rigid and irrelevant to these serious changes concentrating only in the texts rather than the objectives of Shariah except very few papers including Maqasid al Shari’ah in the Prohibition of Riba and their Implications for Modern Islamic Finance by Dr. Monzer Kahf prepared for the IIUM International Conference on Maqasid al Shari’ah, August 8-10, 2006 which is considered as the first unique paper that identified eight essential objectives of prohibition of riba with a real open minded towards the complicated fast moving banking industry particularly Islamic banking clarifying some common misunderstandings to the concept of Riba and interest in a very simple modern way of discussion which is really helps in creating new prospective Shariah permissible structured financing instruments.
In this paper which consists, in addition to the introduction, four sections and conclusion plus some recommendations.
In Section One I will explain the meaning of Riba in language and in Fiqh. And in section 2 I will discuss Riba in Quran and Sunnah as well as the Riba and interest, Riba and trade, and also presenting briefly some theories in prohibition of Riba.
Section 3 will be reserved for the objectives of the prohibition of Riba. And finally in section 4 I will discuss the implications of the objectives of the prohibition of Riba.

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