Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion

Bangladesh, a deeply impoverished nation of nearly 160 million with the world’s fourth-largest Muslim population, has a rapidly growing Islamic finance industry, anchored by its oldest Islamic bank, the Islami Bank Bangladesh Limited (IBBL). IBBL is one of Bangladesh’s largest banks, offering commercial and consumer financing, tremendously popular remittances servicesfor migrant workers, and an Islamic microfinance program for the rural poor, the Rural Development Scheme (RDS). Since its inception in 1983, the Islami Bank has described itself as a religious as well as financial institution dedicated to poverty alleviation—an identification often invoked by employees during our conversations. In addition to the regulatory, staffing andmonitoring structures to ensure the Shari’a compliance of IBBL’s operations, its expansion strategy, corporate culture, and the semiotics of its branding and marketing reinforce IBBL’s status in Bangladesh as an Islamic institution. My PhD dissertation is an ethnography of finance, Islam, and poverty that explores the theoretical registers of Islamic (micro)finance client experience and institutional management threaded through the money, policy, and influence connecting Saudi Arabia to the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka to a small-town slum tucked along the Bay of Bengal.