Beyond Debt describes efforts to create a transnational economy free of debt. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, Daromir Rudnyckyj illustrates how the state, led by the central bank, seeks to make the country’s capital Kuala Lumpur “the New York of the Muslim world”—the central node of global financial activity conducted in accordance with Islam. Rudnyckyj shows how Islamic financial experts have undertaken ambitious experiments to create more stable economies and stronger social solidarities by facilitating risk- and profit-sharing, enhanced entrepreneurial skills, and more collaborative economic action. Building on scholarship that reveals the impact of financial devices on human activity, he illustrates how Islamic finance is deployed to fashion subjects who are at once more pious Muslims and more ambitious entrepreneurs. In so doing, Rudnyckyj shows how experts seek to create a new “geoeconomics”—a global Islamic alternative to the conventional financial network centered on New York, London, and Tokyo. A groundbreaking analysis of a timely subject, Beyond Debt tells the captivating story of efforts to re-center international finance in an emergent Islamic global city and, ultimately, to challenge the very foundations of conventional finance.

Introduction: Pious Finance in the Islamic Global City

Part I. Infrastructure

Chapter 1. An Infrastructure for Islamic Finance

Chapter 2. Expertise in Action

Chapter 3.

Counterdebt

Part II. Operations

Chapter 4. Making Bonds Islamic

Chapter 5. Adjacent System or Original Knowledge?

Chapter 6. Consuming Form, Investing in Substance

Part III. Problematization

Chapter 7. Experimenting with Risk

Chapter 8. Subjects of Debt, Subjects of Equity

Conclusion: An Emergent Geoeconomics

Acknowledgments

Appendix A: Methodological Notes

Appendix B: Glossary of Islamic Financial Terms

Notes

References

Index