Islamic Finance in Europe (European Central Bank Occasional Paper No 146)
What this source says
An institutional survey from the European Central Bank's Occasional Paper Series (No 146, June 2013) maps how Islamic finance had developed across Europe by 2013, with detailed country sections on the United Kingdom, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Germany and Italy. It describes the UK as 'one of the most advanced Islamic financial markets in the western world', home to the West's first fully-fledged Shari'ah-compliant retail bank and (at the time of writing) five true Islamic banks; it records that Islamic-finance activity began in the UK in the 1980s with London Metal Exchange murabaha-based overnight deposit facilities, that the 2005 Sanctuary Building Sukuk was the first corporate sukuk issued in Europe, and that the UK government established its first Islamic Finance Task Force in March 2013. Crucially for home buyers, the paper explains that early UK Islamic mortgages — structured on the murabaha and then ijara principles — were perceived as very expensive because of double stamp duty (charged once when the bank bought the house and again when the client bought it from the bank), and that the abolition of this double-taxation regime in 2004 paved the way for increased demand for Islamic home financing. The France section records a parallel pattern: tax measures from 2008–2010 removed double stamp duty and exempted non-resident sukuk investors from withholding tax, and after the first Islamic deposit scheme launched in June 2011 a 10-year murabaha home-finance product followed and 'was met with strong demand'. On the investment-funds side, the paper notes that European Islamic funds represented about 8.3% of the global Islamic fund industry, with Ireland and Luxembourg together accounting for around 7%, and that the London Stock Exchange was then the largest venue for sukuk listings (one of four major sukuk-listing domiciles alongside Bursa Malaysia, NASDAQ Dubai and the Luxembourg Stock Exchange). Throughout, it works from the standard contract toolkit — murabaha (cost-plus sale), ijara (lease), musharaka and mudaraba (profit-sharing partnerships) and sukuk (asset-backed certificates) — as the Shari'ah-compliant substitutes for interest-based instruments.
Wording inside quotation marks is quoted from the source. The rest is this notebook’s summary of it — read the original before relying on it.
Provenance
- Compiled from
- Filippo di Mauro, Pierluigi Caristi, Stéphane Couderc, Angela Di Maria, Lauren Ho, Baljeet Kaur Grewal, Sergio Masciantonio, Steven Ongena and Sajjad Zaher — ECB Occasional Paper Series No 146, June 2013
- Source
- European Central Bank, Occasional Paper Series No 146, 'Islamic Finance in Europe' (June 2013), by Filippo di Mauro et al.
- School / basis
- Comparative
- Captured
- 2026-06-21
- Added
- 2026-06-21
- Trust
- Primary or near-primary source with a stable public URL.
Compiler’s note
PDF fetched live 2026-06-21 from ecb.europa.eu (2.7 MB) and read in full via text extraction (WebFetch returned binary; pdftotext -layout extracted the text). Every claim verified directly against the document: exact title/series-number/date ('Occasional Paper Series No 146 / June 2013', 'ISLAMIC FINANCE IN EUROPE'); the full author list as printed on the title page; the UK passage ('one of the most advanced Islamic financial markets in the western world', West's first fully-fledged Shari'ah-compliant retail bank, five true Islamic banks, 1980s LME murabaha overnight deposits, 2005 Sanctuary Building Sukuk as the first corporate sukuk in Europe, March 2013 Islamic Finance Task Force, double-stamp-duty abolition in 2004); the France passage (2008–2010 tax measures, withholding-tax exemption for non-resident sukuk investors, June 2011 first Islamic deposit scheme + 10-year murabaha home-finance product 'met with strong demand'); and the funds figures (European Islamic funds ~8.3% of the global Islamic fund industry, Ireland+Luxembourg ~7%, London Stock Exchange the largest sukuk-listing venue, four major sukuk-listing domiciles). FRESHNESS: this is a 2013 institutional snapshot — every figure and 'currently/at present' claim is attributed as the paper's June-2013 position, NOT presented as a current figure (e.g. the bank counts and fund percentages were true as at 2013). The ECB's own disclaimer is respected: the paper states it 'should not be reported as representing the views of the European Central Bank' and that the views are the authors'; this entry attributes the work to the named authors under the ECB Occasional Paper Series, not to the ECB as an institutional position. FIRST continental-EUROPE entry in the corpus — added GLOBAL-FIRST to balance an articles bucket that previously spanned only US/UK/CA/AU + ZA with zero EU coverage; ECB was preferred as a neutral, authoritative institutional source (not a provider ad). No verbatim quotes beyond short attributed phrases and unavoidable structure names; no figures invented or carried from secondary write-ups.
Topics
islamic-financemortgagehome-financesukukeuroperegulationmarket-data
This is source material, not a ruling. The corpus records what a named source actually said, so that you can read it yourself and take it to a scholar you trust. Ask the corpus to search all entries at once, or return to the library.