By MUSHTAK PARKER | ARAB NEWS
Islamic finance and business education has flourished over the last decade or so in line with the growth of the industry. Universities, business schools, colleges and professional bodies — both in the Muslim countries and in other countries especially Europe, Singapore and the US — have introduced courses on Islamic finance purportedly helping to meet the demand for trained human capital, the dearth of which is a major bottleneck threatening the continued growth of the industry.
Not surprisingly, in the absence of a globally recognized accreditation body for Islamic finance and business education, quality and standards are at best mixed, with some courses bordering on the ordinary and mediocre. At the same time, students who do graduate, complain that it is very difficult to find employment placements in the Islamic finance industry, sometimes even as internships.
In the UK, maintains Professor Simon Archer of the ICMA Center and the Henley Business School, Reading University, which offers Masters and PhD courses in Islamic Finance, “a number of universities responded to this demand for human capital development in the Islamic finance industry with varying levels of quality. Some of these responses it seems to me personally to be rather opportunistic. They saw this bandwagon and the chance of fees to be earned from new students, and decided to jump on. There are some very honorable exceptions to this, especially Durham University.”