The Secretary General of the Academy, H.E. Prof. Koutoub Mustapha Sano chaired the 93rd weekly meeting of the directors of the Academy’s departments on Monday 14 Rabi’ al-Awal 1444, corresponding to 11 October 2022, at the Secretariat General’s headquarters in Jeddah.

His Excellency opened the meeting by greeting and thanking the participants for their regular attendance, and then spoke about his participation in the 4th Sharjah International Conference on Islamic Economy, organized by the Sharjah Center for Islamic Economics in Al Qasimia University, under the title “Codification of the Rulings of Contemporary Islamic Financial Transactions”. His Excellency therefore expressed his gratitude and appreciation to the Emirate of Sharjah, the government, and people of the United Arab Emirates for their warm welcome and hospitality, and to Al Qasimia University and all the officials for the choice of the conference’s theme and its successful organization.

His Excellency commended the objectives of this important international conference, which aims at defining the criteria for the successful codification of the rulings on Islamic financial transactions, presenting the contemporary local and international practices and experiences in codification, as well as the most important legal and juridical problems in this process and their solutions. His Excellency stressed that the ruler (government), or anyone he appoints to delegate him, should issue Shariah rulings related to one of the five categories of Islamic jurisprudence, and classify these selected rulings according to an important temporal interest;hence, this is considered as one of the desired types of Ijtihad in this era.

His Excellency also called for better management of financial transactions in Islamic financial institutions through the codification of the rulings of financial transactions, stressing that codification has become a religious duty and a modern necessity. His Excellency also pointed out that this conference has moved the issue of codification from theory to application, and from hopes to tangible possibilities, by highlighting the foundations and pillars on which the codification of the rulings on contemporary financial transaction should be laid down.

The conference concluded with a number of recommendations, the most important of which is that the Academy should undertake coordination between the Shariah bodies that issue standards on financial transactions and the methods followed for codification in a correct, scientific and legitimate manner, to be submitted to the Council of the Academy for approval by the OIC Member states.

The departments’ meeting also discussed the decisions of the previous meeting, to ascertain their progress, and issued several new decisions, including:

• Continue to send the ready-made research papers of the next session to their authors, as well as the deadline for submitting their presentations and draft presentations.
• Planning the next session’s program (scientific sub-sessions with their titles), with a proposal for the timing of each, according to the subject and the number of researchers.
• Preparing the appreciation gifts that will be distributed to the participating guests at the 25th session.