بطاقات الائتمان: قضايا اقتصادية وشرعية معاصرة[Credit cards: contemporary economic and Shariah issues]

Islamic banks and financial institutions have started recently issuing Islamic credit cards as substitutes to the conventional credit cards, after the later were unanimously deemed unlawful by the Shariah scholars due to the Riba involved therein. However, the Islamic credit cards are not of the same structures; some have been constructed on the basis of Eina and Tawarruq sales despite the fact that these two sales were ruled as unlawful by the Fiqh academies. The most common structure of Islamic credit cards, however, is the Ijarah model where the card issuer is deemed a lessor of the services embedded in the credit card, in addition to some other additional services, but not the credit provided to the cardholder against fixed periodical fee. Although this structure seems acceptable from Shariah point of view, it involves some Shariah issues that need to be carefully addressed before attempting to judge their validity. The paper comes to elaborate on these important issues and analyze the different contractual relationship involved in these cards in an attempt to outline the prospectus of a genuinely Shariah compliant credit card.