The aftermath of the crisis has seen the reputation of conservative sharia banking soar. Four experts in the sector look at how this falling into favour is likely to affect sharia finance's short-term and long-term prospects, edited by Anindita GhoshrnZeid Ayer: It depends on the asset class. For the two most common types of assets - equities and fixed income - broad market indices can be used as proxies for the asset class by comparing the performance of sharia-compliant indices with their conventional counterparts. If one looks at the performance over the recent bearish market, Islamic equity market indices have outperformed their conventional counterparts. For fixed income, however, such a comparison is difficult to make as the universe of sharia-compliant bonds [sukuk] is much smaller than conventional bonds and there isn't any index that is representative of the global sukuk universe.
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