İslam Medeniyeti Araştırmaları Dergisi (Dec 2024)
The Qualification of Islamic Insurance Contract
Abstract
The concept of insurance, which emerged in the West in the fourteenth century, was introduced to the Islamic world in the nineteenth century. The religious ruling of insurance, which became widespread in Muslim countries in a short time, started to be discussed among the faqihs. In this process, faqihs, who addressed the issue from the perspective of classical contract theory in fiqh, stated that insurance was not permissible due to prohibited elements such as ignorance, gambling, loss, gharar (uncertainity), and interest. This negative opinion on the validity of insurance induce Muslims with interest-sensibility to seek an alternative to conventional insurance. These efforts paved the way for the emergence of the concept of Islamic insurance. Although Islamic insurance has been used in some academic studies for other types of insurance other than conventional insurance, the term “takaful insurance” is meant by this concept in the finance sector today. In Turkiye, however, the concept of “participation insurance” has recently been widely used instead of takāful. It is remarkable that the Islamic insurance system, which began on a simple cooperative basis, evolved into a mixed structure in the following period. For this reason, Islamic insurance contracts are considered to be in the category of “compound/complex contracts” in modern economics. In this study, the qualificaiton of Islamic insurance contracts will be analyzed based on the typical contracts in the fiqh literature.
Keywords
