Islamic finance struggles toward mainstream in Azerbaijan

BAKU/TBILISI: When a businessman in Muslim-majority Azerbaijan wanted a bank loan that complied with Islamic principles, until a few years ago he had to negotiate it under the table.

The government's fear of political Islam forced banks to conduct "guerrilla Islamic finance" in which sharia-compliant deals were hidden under the appearance of conventional banking, says Fuad Aliyev, a scholar at Johns Hopkins University's Central Asia-Caucasus Institute in Washington DC.