Islamic Finance for Dummies

"There's two faces [or] aspects of Islamic banking, one which was doing it for the rich and affluent, the people from the Gulf countries that came to invest in big real estate projects and so on . . . They spent all this money trying to change the word "interest" to the word "profit" or whatever I called it Mickey Mouse Islamic banking. And then [there is] the work that we are doing, which is the grassroots work, which calls things by their names."

Some book recommendations on Islamic Finance;

Saeed, Abdullah,Islamic Banking and Interest: A Study of the Prohibition of Riba and Its Contemporary Interpretation Brill Academic Publishers, 1997

Lewis, Mervin and Latifa Algaoud, Islamic Banking, Edward Elgar, Pub., 2001.

Warde, Ibrahim, Islamic Finance in the Global Economy, Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Henry, Clement and Rodney Wilson (eds.), The Politics of Islamic Finance, Edinburgh University Press, 2004.

Vogel, Frank, and Samuel Hayes, Islamic Law and Finance:Religion, Risk, and Return, (paperback) Springer, 1998.

Usmani, M. Taqi, An Introduction to Islamic Finance, Springer, 2002.

Maurer, Bill, Mutual Life, Limited: Islamic Banking, Alternative Currencies, Lateral Reason, Princeton University Press, 2005.

Kuran, Timur, Islam and Mammon: The Economic Predicaments of Islamism, Princeton University Press, 2005.

Islamic Finance-Law, Economics, and Practice by Mahmoud A. El-Gamal,Rice University, Houston

My favorite is Timur Kuran. The quote is from Mauer Bill's book.