Sadakat Kadri

Koranic Derivatives

Heaven’s Bankers: Inside the Hidden World of Islamic Finance

By

Constable & Robinson 347pp £20 order from our bookshop

Mecca’s had a makeover. The city towards which Muslims have been praying for over 1,400 years has a new focal point. Seven skyscrapers now surround its Grand Mosque, and at their centre stands a clock tower similar to Big Ben, only six times bigger and eight million LEDs brighter. Countless balconies now overlook Islam’s sanctum sanctorum, while an air-conditioned shopping mall sprawls across the lower levels of the complex. Open idolatry in Saudi Arabia remains inadvisable – beheadable, indeed – but Mammon at last has its own shrine. 

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Tarantino's latest film is 'a fairy tale about Hollywood, where fantasy is an industrial product and the boulevards… ,
    • 'I don’t think we’re here on Earth to be Happy. I think we’re here on Earth to help God. I am a messianic writer'.… ,
    • 'Darley’s book is not a mad dash through this most compelling and complex of English counties. Nor is it another ti… ,
    • 'Moser’s book offers such a gripping account of a profoundly damaged human being, trapped in a cycle of repetition,… ,
    • 'Ideas that I’d thought were set down in full continue to smoulder ... this book is only a snapshot of some larger… ,
    • 'Full of invention which, at its most pedestrian, is eminently Victorian, and at its most unrestrained wildly imagi… ,
    • 'What in other hands could have been a dry, pedantic account of Christianity’s birth and evolution becomes in Holla… ,
    Follow Us