Murabaha

rdf:langString Murabaha

rdf:langString Murabaḥah, murabaḥa, or murâbaḥah (Arabic: مرابحة, derived from ribh Arabic: ربح, meaning profit) was originally a term of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) for a sales contract where the buyer and seller agree on the markup (profit) or "cost-plus" price for the item(s) being sold. In recent decades it has become a term for a very common form of Islamic (i.e., "shariah compliant") financing, where the price is marked up in exchange for allowing the buyer to pay over time—for example with monthly payments (a contract with deferred payment being known as bai-muajjal). Murabaha financing is similar to a rent-to-own arrangement in the non-Muslim world, with the intermediary (e.g., the lending bank) retaining ownership of the item being sold until the loan is paid in full. There are also Islamic investment funds and sukuk (Islamic bonds) that use murabahah contracts. The purpose of murabaha is to finance a purchase without involving interest payments, which most Muslims (particularly most scholars) consider riba (usury) and thus haram (forbidden). Murabaha has come to be "the most prevalent" or "default" type of Islamic finance. A proper murâbaḥah transaction differs from conventional interest-charging loans in several ways. The buyer/borrower pays the seller/lender at an agreed-upon higher price; instead of interest charges, the seller/lender makes a religiously permissible "profit on the sale of goods". The seller/financer must take actual possession of the good before selling it to the customer, and must assume "any liability from delivering defective goods". Sources differ as to whether the seller is permitted to charge extra when payments are late, with some authors stating any late fees ought to be donated to charity, or not collected unless the buyer has "deliberately refused" to make a payment. For the rate of markup, murabaha contracts "may openly use" riba interest rates such as LIBOR "as a benchmark", a practice approved of by the scholar Taqi Usmani. Conservative scholars promoting Islamic finance consider murabaha to be a "transitory step" towards a "true profit-and-loss-sharing mode of financing", and a "weak" or "permissible but undesirable" form of finance to be used where profit-and-loss-sharing is "not practicable." Critics/skeptics complain/note that in practice most "murabaḥah" transactions are merely cash-flows between banks, brokers, and borrowers, with no buying or selling of commodities; that the profit or markup is based on the prevailing interest rate used in haram lending by the non-Muslim world; that "the financial outlook" of Islamic murabaha financing and conventional debt/loan financing is "the same", as is most everything else besides the terminology used.